aaamusic | On 04, Dec 2011

Let me ask you a simple question concerning European Garage Rock bands with a fetish for forty year old riffs, caveman drumming and frontmen who mix the preening of Jagger with the screams of Iggy Pop, with attempts at bigging themselves up that, with a less than confident grasp of the English language, come off as more endearing than arrogant. Now, where have we seen this before? I’ve always been a firm supporter of old school Rock ‘n’ Roll being the one genre of music where people who are good at it (Key words there) possess the right to never, ever change their sound, for what they’re doing is a lot more exciting than anything else they could do. However. Thee Attacks seem to have punctured a hole in my theory. They seem to do everything I would usually associate with sixties-dancing awesomeness but… I just can’t get behind this in the same way. It leaves me cold. I must become a massive hypocrite and complain that… I’ve heard this all before!

And, comparatively, this is all done rather well. There’s enough variety in the tracks, in the sense that Twirling Around’s enormous, distorted bass isn’t around anywhere else on the album, and gives the track is given a new lease of life because of it, and there’s a couple of quiter moments in Love in the City and Red Light (relatively, Red Light still swaggers like the rest of the album). And at the same time, the songs all pound along in the way that The Hives do so well, closer Are You? has a slightly more rawer feel in the intro than a lot of the album as a whole, and opener Love In Disguise is probably the best thing on here, the kind of swinging sixties groove that feels like it’s perpetually on an episode of Ready, Steady, Go. So in all, there’s a more subtle problem with this collection, one that I’d be more than willing to accept as wrong, and it’s my own taste that’s in the wrong, and that’s a slight sense of cynicism that runs through the record like a particularly nasty damp stain.

This album gives me the feeling that Thee Attacks had the same theory that I had when they recorded this album, the sense that if you string a load of riffs pilfered from “Nuggets” you’ll get something supernaturally exciting and fun. Especially if you’re from (kind of)  more exotic climes. Well, this record makes me a hypocrite. It does everything I thought I’d want out of an old school styled rock record, and it bores the everloving shit out of me. Dammit.  

Author: Will Howard