Published on Aug 15, 2000
Hello again, Peabrain here. With me is my boy, Herman.
Herman, set the Farback Machine for 1984. The place? Hollywood,
California – the scene of the rebirth of glam rock in the form of
heavy metal hair bands. Okay, push the button to launch the
machine…
Wait a minute, something’s wrong here… something’s very wrong.
I know we’re in California, but this seems to be more like 2000.
Herman, you nitwit, you crossed the wires of the Farback Machine
with the flight schedule for United Airlines. What have I told you
about surfing the Net on company time?
All I know at this point is I’m hearing this band, Spiders &
Snakes, and I’m wondering if they got caught up in the electronic
jumble that landed us here instead of the mid-’80s. Even a copy of
their latest disc,
London Daze, has mysteriously appeared in the on-deck CD
player, and I’m wondering how such a relic could ever survive in
the early days of the 21st Century.
I mean, just look at the band – vocalist/lead guitarist Lizzie
Grey, rhythm guitarist Doug E. Sex, bassist/samples Leigh Lawson
and drummer/backing vocalist Timothy Jay. They’re wearing sneers
like I haven’t seen since Guns N’ Roses burst onto the scene.
Musically, though, they’re much weaker than their image
suggests.
Don’t understand, Herman? Go to the CD player, and select track
number three, “Party In Hollywood”. Or maybe you’ll understand when
the next track, “Radio Stars,” blares forth in its ignominy. This
is a band who are most definitely trapped in a time warp, from the
songwriting down to the actual performance of the tracks. The
slip-shod attitude of recording these is apparent – far more so
than I think the band intended it to be.
And if the ’80s flashback isn’t enough, take a closer listen to
some of these songs, and hear the pure ’70s glam influence on this
band.
London Daze absolutely reeks of this, from their covers of
“Run, Run, Run” and “Rock And Roll Queen” to the New York
Dolls-like delivery of “Elvis’s TV” – good grief! What were these
guys thinking?
They even dig back in the band’s own history to their first
demos as “London” (hence the album’s title), featuring a young
musician named Nikki Sixx. (We all know what he would later move on
to as a musician.) These songs are pretty decent – that is, except
for the sound quality. My god, it sounds like this tape was kept in
the cat’s litter box for 20 years.
What’s sad is that
London Daze probably could have been a halfway decent album,
had some real attention been paid to the songwriting and the actual
performances. Instead, all I’m hearing is a band who is more
interested in having a good time recording than making an album
that is structurally solid. Sadly, this is a disc that, like many
spiders, deserves to be squashed… and with that, let’s set the
Farback Machine to take us home.