Equation #36: The Mooney Suzuki

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The Mooney Suzuki

God bless The Mooney Suzuki. The one American band to shamelessly rip off The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground and actually make it work to their favor. They dress like The Ramones, their album covers ape landmark eras in music and they managed to lure in Suzuki (the auto makers) to feature their music based on their face-melting sound rather than get sued by them.

Speaking of face-melting: the first three albums these leather-clad, shaggy rocksmiths put out there were filled with the kind of sweaty, bucking, hand-clapping rock that makes you want to kick a trash can. Great fun. Their debut "People Get Ready" is raw, unabashed and, if albums had smells, would smell like George Thorogood (sweat, bourbon and your sister's perfume). On their latest "Have Mercy" they've taken it down a notch, not so much that they've softened up, but they've turned their amps down from 11 to about 9.5. The songs here are still about the rock 'n' roll lifestyle; booze, drugs, women, and havin' a good time, but it's a more refined kind of excess. While the songs on "People Get Ready" were about the need for gratification and the drive to experience and the urgency of living in the now, with names like "Singin' a Song About Today", "Right About Now" and "Do It"; "Have Mercy" is almost a reflection on those wild times through the lens of regretless reminiscence. The prime example of this is the hilarious ragtime sing-along "Good Ol' Alcohol", chronicling the life-long trip through the purple haze along side the always reliable booze. Lyrics like "Autumn is come/our summer is done..." from "Ashes" hint at a sense of mortality, as does the surprisingly tender "The Prime of Life" and the final reassurance of "Down but Not Out". Overall it's an album of hard-earned lessons about the difficulty of love, the repercussions of fast-living and the ever-looming shadow of time. The sound is mature, (there's even some dry, jazzy flute on "Adam and Eve") and is a natural step in the growth of a band that picked up where ZZ Top left off.

Despite a relatively short career they express surprising wisdom, they appear as men who've jumped on the back of life and dug their heels in, then clung to it's ankle as it dragged them across the floor. We can only hope that they've still got some rocking left in them and that this isn't a bittersweet goodbye.

Equation #35: The Cribs

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The Cribs

There's an idiom that people use to describe the even in which a new addition to an old stereotype pushes beyond the status quo and generates a new medium or, as middle management would say, "a new paradigm". The expression I refer to is "broke the mould". After almost ten years of fairly consistent releases by British and New York bands that rely on the dancy, post-punk sound, borrowing most of their ideas from the 1970s with only marginal innovation, the release of The Cribs third album "Men's Needs, Woman's Needs, Whatever" leaves the mould staunchly intact. This is not to say that it's a bad album, which it really isn't, it's just that when word comes down the pipe about the "next big band" that's just about to be "discovered" and it turns out it's just three guys playing the same music as everyone else it's a bit disappointing.

That said, the album needs a reviewin' and I reckon we ought to have one. In the vein of Arctic Monkeys, The Futureheads and Maximo Park, The Cribs play bouncy, punkish rock with a danceable beat and chirping syncopated guitars. Generally snotty, heavily accented vocals and purposely rough production only add to the idea that while their songs are original, their sound is not. Borrowing from the Stone Roses, Sonic Youth, Pavement, and produced by Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos the Cribs take the road more traveled and still manage to add a decent album of toe tappers into the collective genre. It's an album that feels familiar but asserts itself as a singular work with variations on it's contemporaries. In other words, it's not exactly The Strokes and it's not exactly The Futureheads but it's close.

So maybe they will be the next "big band", maybe they'll have a number one record and show up on MTV or an iPod commercial, it's not impossible, in fact it's downright plausible considering the taste of the current market. Even if they did make it big, success still doesn't break the mould.