The Deathray Davies - The Kick and the Snare

Genre rock Publisher Glurp External Links Official Website Glurp

It was a good idea, I'll give them that. It's gotten a bit out of hand, though, don't you think? The Brian Jonestown Massacre, the Dandy Warhols, Jesus Chrysler Supercar, the Deathray Davies, ad infinitum. If we really want to stretch our hoses, let's tack on Kathleen Turner Overdrive (of High Fidelity fame) and Moby Dick Nixon (which I just made up). The idea here is that you take a name from one cultural sphere (say, a popular sci-fi prop) and mash it up Jeopardy style with another name from a different cultural sphere (perhaps the front man for a famous rock band). Voila! Irony!

For the trick to work, though, (I mean for your band name to be really clever), it helps if those two elements synthesize into an image, like a dialectic resolving itself in some brilliant visual cacophony. On these grounds, the Brian Jonestown Massacre totally wins. Picture a drained swimming pool full of rabid, screaming teenage cult-worshippers swilling Dixie cups full of punch poisoned with concentrated doses of chlorine, while Mr. Jones himself stands on the diving board towering above firing a shotgun into the air and speaking in tongues. That's (almost) what Anton Newcomb's perpetual train-wreck of a band sounds like.

The Deathray Davies, now, don't quite make it. A bunch of sharp-dressed Mods wearing their purple hearts on their sleeves and their silver, bubble-nozzled, fusion-powered laser pistols on their hips? Like Hans Solo if he danced and maybe looked in the mirror before he left the house for chrissakes. I would dig that band, I'm pretty sure, chasing space aliens and shooting at them, and then having cold, mechanical sex with them while listening to an original pressing of a Small Faces 45 that's so rare it was never even recorded. But these guys each own a copy, dontcha know; that's how fucking together they are.

But that's not really what the Deathray Davies has going for it. Which is no fault of theirs (unless you count their not thinking exactly like me a fault - which I do, I guess). The Kick and the Snare, now that's a record title that means what it says. Within seconds of listening to the new record by the Deathray Davies, my keenly attuned auditory nerves apprehended not one, but both of the titular drums. Honesty, I guess is what I'm trying to say. This is earnest rock and roll music, ebullient, happy to be so. In fact, album opener "The Fall Fashions" is almost revelatory in just how normal it sounds. Blaring horns and a half-step descent into gloom after the opening instrumental salvo warns that this song could take a wrong turn. Turns out it just pulled over to dig its Apples (in Stereo) mix tape out of the backseat clutter, because in a second its back on the road, humming and spilling its cherry soda everywhere.

This is the first time Joe Dufilho, formerly the loneliest Deathray, has taken a steady band with him into the studio for a DD record. It sounds like it, too, like he's finally found that band he can trust enough to really open up to, a band that understands, that cares. Suffices to say, the majority of The Kick and the Snare is on the pop tip. The songs have their clever moments as well. The mid-tempo jangler "In Circles" does just like the name says. In fact, the song is full of circles: a dizzy keyboard figure underlies the instrumental build-up at the end, and the chorus itself gets all self-referential as Dufilho sings that "It's funny how everything goes in circles." Then, just when you're ready for a catharsis of Transatlantendentalistic proportions, it just cuts out. Again, clever boys. I'm sensing a pattern (a circular one).

More and more and more cleverness! "Plan to Stay Awake" features some nimble wordplay and a cottage cheese chorus and comes off, well, pleasant enough. Clever things, though, are like Twinkies: they've got long shelf lives but you only need to eat one. And it's great when you want it, sugary and not fooling anybody as to its chemical origins. Instant gratification. A professor once told me (in a particularly stinging little note at the end of a mediocre/ incomprehensible essay) that it's a shame when what could be smart wastes it time just being clever. And maybe I didn't learn that lesson as well as I could have, and maybe nobody even told the Deathray Davies. Well. A Twinkie once in a while won't kill you, I guess.