Rating My CD's: I Got Struck By Lightning, and Now I Glow

29. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion -- Plastic Fang

It sometimes happens that I buy a record and can't stop listening to it, bowled over by its energy, punch, and hooks, and when I pull my head up out of it, no one else has paid any attention. It's kind of annoying, and it always makes me want to slap the collective cognoscenti up the side of their expensively coiffed heads and scream "Are You Retarded? How Did You Miss This Album?"

Now, in some sense, I've already done that with regard to Plastic Fang, the penultimate JSBX disc. So I probably don't need to go again into the fact that the trendhumping bastards who rin the indie music mags decided that Spencer & Co. were so five minutes ago when the White Stripes showed up, only to dust off their late-90's admiration and put it back on the shelf as soon as it was safe to do so.

Rating My CD's: Let's Have a Partay!

28. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion -- Acme

If you had met me in the spring of 1996, and then the following fall, you would have done a double-take. In fact, a few people did. In between my sophomore and junior year of college, I had ditched my frightening tortoise-shell androgynous Birth Control Glasses and gotten contact lenses. I'd also bought some new clothes and cut my hair. Gone were the eye-disturbing blood-red-on-blood-red ensembles, the greasy mushroom fro, the general sense of "I don't know who the fuck I am, but you're going to see me, dammit."

I'd also started a strange kind of internet flirtation with a girl who lived in Kentucky, who shall remain nameless so as not to injure her reputation for ever getting herself involved with the likes of me.  Both of these have a connection with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in general and Acme in particular.

Rating My CD's: My Father Was Sister Ray

27. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion -- Orange

Back in December of 1999, when I still though The City Paper was worth reading, I came across one of the inescapable Best of the Nineties records, which is to say, three of them (because our authoritative critical voice must have a multiplicty of opinion!). And one of them had Orange somewhere right in the middle.

I already had Acme, and liked it, and had heard from the former internet semi-girlfriend who got me into them (more on that later), that their earlier stuff was better. I was still too young to roll my eyes at said cliche, so I schlepped into Center City Philadelphia on the train, and picked up this silver-leafed disc at the HMV on 15th and Walnut.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Killed and Revived.

This is what I mean when I talk about the music industry double-helix:



Eight years ago, when the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion released Plastic Fang, Pitchfork had these words of encouragement:

In response to those failures, Spencer & Co. have returned to the basics for Plastic Fang: two guitars, a bag full of riffs, and frequent interjections of "Blues Explosion!" Never mind the tiny fact that the band's gimmick, if tired in the mid-nineties, is downright comatose these days. Nobody seems to have informed JSBX that the world's music warehouse has become overstocked on pale-faced blues, with the White Stripes, etc. improving the sound by keeping things quick and raw while dispensing with the ironic wink.

And now that they've got a greatest hits out, the kings of consistency appraise it thusly:

Dirty Shirt Rock 'n' Roll surveys the years between their 1992 debut and 2002's Plastic Fang. Unlike the consistently name-checked and beloved Pavement, another Matador band with a new retrospective in stores, the Blues Explosion seem ripe for re-evaluation. The early-2000s garage rock revival and the success of the White Stripes have given us a new context to hear these disarrayed blues-rock excursions, which similarly peel back the layers to get to rock's core elements.

 Now, I could go through a few more paragraphs of dudgeon, explaining that I always rather liked Plastic Fang, but I'm saving that for my CD ratings. So I'll give Pitchfork the same shrift I gave Spin: They're a Bunch of Whores.