The last great album I discovered in 2006
Robert Moore | Chicago, IL USA | 12/30/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"With only one day left in 2006, I'm not likely to discover another killer album this year. But the last turned out also to be one of the best. This album is not widely known in the US due to it still not being available as anything other than an import. It is not even available on iTunes and other music download services. Hopefully 2007 will see a correction. I have to confess to not knowing a whole lot about the band. Most of the songs are credited to guitarist Dorian Cox and The Long Blondes, which probably means he writes the songs, presents them to the band, and they all hash out the final form. What is surprising about this is that the band has a distinctly feminist slant on things. They seem in many ways to be the English answer to the Riot Girl bands in the U.S. You could easily do a triple bill of Le Tigre, Sleater-Kinney (alas, if only they were still together), and The Long Blondes and have no clash of values or viewpoint. The band has much of the same brassiness of Third Wave inspired feminist rock, yet the songs are written by a guy. Well, perhaps not so bizarre. The turning point in strongly empowered female characters occurred with BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, created by a male feminist, Joss Whedon. So why can't a guy write songs that represent a female take on things?
If Dorian Cox writes the songs, Kate Jackson sells them. And man, does she ever sell them. With this album she instantly joins the ranks of the most compelling female frontwomen in rock. She has a great voice, with plenty of power when she needs it, but capable of subtlety as well. They have her voice far forward in the mix, where it belongs. I love the way she manages to do so many things vocally in "Heaven Help the New Girl," and does them all well. If you compare her with, say, Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kate doesn't have all the tricks that Karen can pull off, but she has a much more powerful voice and a wider effective range.
But what really puts this band over the top for me is not just that they come with a great set of well-written songs and a phenomenal singer to sing them, but that the Long Blondes are a great band. Screech Louder on drums, Emma Chaplain on guitar (and back up vocals), Reenie Delaney on bass (how refreshing to have a chick on guitar and a guy on bass for a change), and Cox on lead guitar are a tremendously tight, inventive, and skilled. Sometimes when you have someone as good as Kate Jackson, there is a talent gap between singer and band, but that certainly is not the case here. This truly is a band, with everyone contributing enormously to the final project.
The highpoint of the album for me is "Weekend without Makeup," in which a woman chronicles how stale her relationship has grown. It is a subject that has been dealt with in countless songs, but it seems so fresh here and the notion of defining a weekend by the fact that she doesn't need to put on any make up really speaks volumes. All in all, though, the album has a number of really strong cuts. "Lust in the Movies," "Once and Never Again" (in which the singer tells a 19-year-old that she really doesn't need a boyfriend but should instead focus on life without the need of one), "Giddy Stratospheres," "In the Company of Women," "Separated by Motorways," and "Heaven Help the New Girl." The album may fade ever so slightly by the end, but these days most bands put their strongest material in the first two-thirds of the disc.
I do want to quibble with a criticism that the previous reviewer made of the album. He or she indicated that this album is "derivative." This is a criticism that is frequently made by people of one album or artist or another. But I have to confess that it is a criticism I've never been able to make any sense of. There are two sides to my perplexity, one general and one specific. Take the specific first, I listened to this album multiple times and not once thought "Wow, this is derivative." Of course there are a host of moments where the album recalls other performers. At various points the band reminds me of outfits as diverse as the Smiths, Pulp, Joy Division, and Blondie, but sometimes even some sixties girl groups. But I absolutely promise any prospective listener: you will not listen to this and think that they are ripping off any other bands' riffs. They certainly are not more "derivative" than any other band at work today. Which leads to the more general side of my perplexity: given the fact that we now have over fifty years of rock and roll informing any rock album today, how is it possible for any band to be anything other than derivative? Even the Beatles were derivative, aping a host of American R&B bands and artists. Later they came under the spell of Bob Dylan, who was himself inspired by a score of American folk, blues, and rock performers. Everyone borrows from everyone else. The question is not whether something is "derivative" but whether their particular derivation is any good. And this stuff here is dynamite. If it were boring, that would be another matter. I really don't intend to jump all over the previous reviewer. Honest, I don't. But this is an instance of aiming a largely irrelevant criticism at an absolutely first rate band. At least he and I can fully agree on one thing: this is one of the best albums of 2006."
Track Listings (12) - Disc #1