And it’s our first seven of the year!…
[Video][Website]
[7.00]
W.B. Swygart: Wherein I kick myself for giving Nero a 9, cos this is a 9, and it’s on a totally different level to Lumpy O’Keytar. The first thing I think of is that I can hear the bass strings wobble; the second, that fuzz guitar sweeping in; the third, the clank, the clank, the clank; the fourth, the shopping mall in the original Dawn of the Dead and the eerie bliss that comes when knowledge of your certain doom is accompanied by a fantastic range of soft furnishings; the fifth, how Ko Melina sounds like a girl on a trampoline advertising the world’s creepiest Vitamin C supplement; the sixth, that one day I will see this live and it will be fucking sweet; the seventh, that it’s not a 10 cos there is the odd bit where it sort of wanders into nowhere much, but it is a 9 cos this was originally meant to go up on Friday and I’ve sat on it til Monday-going-into-Tuesday cos I just kind of had to get something written about the damn thing, which must be worth something, yes?
[9]
Zach Lyon: I just can’t conceive of a single situation in which this song justifies its existence. It certainly doesn’t sound good, you can’t dance to it unironically, it’s not good for driving. Maybe if you’re 13 and you’re at that point where your ears are open to everything new but you still haven’t really heard anything…
[2]
Michaelangelo Matos: Made to order for me in some ways, though not all; I admire the Dirtbombs more than love them. But this really does move, and I like the grit they get under the machine groove.
[8]
Anthony Easton: Some serious Lee Hazelwood/Jaques Brel shit going on here, and I love my Europeans when they are too lazy to actually sing, and speak to louche rhythms instead.
[9]
Tom Ewing: A lot of the Dirtbombs’ Detroit techno covers album looks to be made up of stuff from that hazy early 80s proto-techno period — like this, and two Cybotron tracks. Good choice maybe, since that stuff has a little more song structure anyhow. But on this evidence they don’t necessarily need it. The original is one of those tracks I’ve known for years and never linked up to band or title — and I certainly didn’t know it was from Detroit, the dodgy Euro-accent fooling me if nobody else. It’s spacey and hollowed-out enough to suit a similarly bare rock treatment, and to be honest the Dirtbombs kick up a better groove. In fact that ends up being almost an issue — this version is more propulsive, feels like it’s trying to get somewhere, build into a climax or shift towards a solo. You’re left with coiled-up tension that ends up dissipating a little. Even so, an excellent teaser for an LP which suddenly seems very intriguing.
[8]
Frank Kogan: I know it’s not acceptable to make fun of how people talk, but he sounds like a guy in a Count Dracula outfit trying to pick up the waitresses at Hooters. Anyway, it’s deliberate, faux Frrrrançais or something. Hammy fun? Mesmerizing underneath, the dirty rock bass a good fit for techno.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: Sure, it’s a cute idea: deathless techno classic covered note-for-note by a rock band using all the postpunk presets. And for a space I can get lulled into enjoying it just because it’s fucking “Sharevari.” But you can get the same smug classicist effect scoring it for orchestra: the rhythms, not the instruments, are what matter.
[5]
Martin Skidmore: They made a single I really liked once (a cover of “Ode To A Black Man”), so I am sort of well-disposed to them. However, this garage number rumbles along rather monotonously, despite guitars hinting at ominous contained energy, and while I quite like his rough voice, it has nothing interesting to do here. This feels like a dull workout that doesn’t go anywhere.
[4]
Chuck Eddy: Perennially also-ran (i.e.: less compelling than Gore Gore Girls, White Stripes, Electric Six, Clone Defects, Detroit Cobras, and probably Von Bondies) Motor City garage-revival outfit with nonetheless notably African-American frontman (whose theroretically R&B-derived vocalizing has almost always come off mediocre in either soul or rock terms) resurrects archetypal 1981 Motor City proto-techno classic (theoretically inspired by Kano’s 1980 Italo-disco-metal “Holly Dolly,” though I’ve always heard Telex’s 1979 Belgian robo-electro “Moskow Diskow” at least as much) on Genuine Rock Instruments (usually a corny move at least in theory), makes a sonic rendezvous with Motor City muscle-car guitar-rock while retaining zee deceptive fake Continental Euro-accent that the previously nameless (until WGPR “Midnight Funk Association” DJ Electrifying Mojo named them) A Number Of Names had always preposterously used to chronicle their zeegarrrette-smoking and carrrcassette-blasting disco lounge-lizard cruising with his hot playmate in his Porsche 928 (significantly not a Detroit-made car) in the first place. Result: Both the Sprocketiest U.S. quasi-Kraut-rock droned in decades (Oneida’s come close I’m sure but probably no cigar), and a record that ties together seemingly unrelated cross-racial streams from America’s most musical city in ways even I had never imagined possible.
[9]
Mallory O’Donnell: “Sharevari” was always sort of the Masonic handshake for those of us who secretly believed that the strange meeting place of Detroit techno between African-American urban culture and European art student DIY disco, the “George Clinton trapped with Kraftwerk in an elevator” of legend, was the magic starting point in American mythical electronic music culture. The Dirtbombs’ neo-Detroit rock take on it is neither neo nor rock, but really just a largely amplifier-assisted take on the same weird club track feel that fueled the original. Which is really more than fine, because what American club culture needs more than anything else right now is a re-infusion of the funky, persistent vibe of the natal dance scenes, from Downtown to Fire Island to Chicago to Detroit. Effective, timely, and nearly as nipple-tickling as the original.
[9]