Never Enough Notes e-zine // reviews + interviews + music

First up, I hate album reviews.

I never read them, don’t care about them, don’t like writing them, always feel that they’re ignored… etc. (No bloody wonder -Ed)

HOWEVER

I bought Kitty, Daisy and Lewis’ album on the weekend… and I feel moved to review it.

Let me explain.  I went into my local record store (yes, really;  Amazon is always a last resort)  to get a copy of The Doors’ first album as I seem to have been surrounded with The Doors things lately and I didn’t have a copy.  So, I bought a copy and was about to leave when I thought ‘I wonder if they have a copy of LCD Soundsystem’s This Is Happening‘ on vinyl (David’s Records in Letchworth – PLUG – has a great vinyl section).  Of course, ‘L’ is right next to ‘K’ and I made a mistake in how they had labelled things so started looking under ‘K’.

Lo and behold, I came across Kitty, Daisy and Lewis (from now on, referred to as KD&L). I remembered that I had heard of them through The Dash, so after I couldn’t find a copy of This Is Happening, I decided to fight the good fight and buy something by some people who I share mutual friends with.  Off home I go.

(Cut to four hours later)

I want my money back.

(Cut to two days later)

I still want my money back.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with KD&L, they’re all about 18 and have been brought up to believe in the rock n’ roll.  Not the Guns and Roses variety; not the Ramones variety; not even the Brian Setzer variety. They’ve been brought up to believe in the pre-Buddy Holly plane crash, pre-Eddie Chochran car crash, pre-Elvis goes into The Army variety. Which is cool.  In fact, it’s very cool indeed. Sun Records have an awful lot to be proud of.  Same goes for Chess (both of which are namechecked as influences on the back cover).  They’re one of the main reasons that this website exists and DEFINITELY one of the reasons why Recharged Radio exists.

KD&L’s musical education is not so far removed from my own. When I was seven, my biggest achievement so far was to learn how to work our temperamental belt-drive turntable (when I bought my own recently, I went direct-drive!!) so that I could hear Eddie, Gene, Buddy, Phil and Don… When I was 13 and started having my first hormonal cravings for guitars and girls, the first tune I learnt was Brown-Eyed Handsome Man and not the Chuck Berry version – the lesser-known Buddy Holly version.  All the way through my life, I’ve had a major soft spot for rock n’ roll and the more and more I surround myself with all music, you can hear what a major influence those early recordings have had in the last 60 years.

However, the lack of reverence from some quarters for these early recordings always seems to amaze me.  I’ve always hated how Disney films have a nasty tendency to use them as a frippery. Roll Over Beethoven isn’t for sweet family films. It’s a song that’s a thinly veiled message for sex.  I’m no prude but come on… it’s like using NWA’s Fuck Tha Police in Spy Kids or something.

It’s also somewhat forgotten (in amongst the geriatrics staggering around on dancefloors  at weddings) that Eddie Chochran’s Twenty Flight Rock was censored when Cliff Richard performed it here in the UK as it featured the lyric “found my corpse draped over the rail” (the lyric was changed to “found my coat (?!) draped over the rail”) and also, go have a look at the lyrics of Little Brenda Lee’s Bigelow 6-200…

In the space between then and now, what with Eminem, Marilyn Manson, RATM, etc, it’s easy to forget that Jerry, Johnny, Carl and co. had to have twice as much fire and balls to get their music heard.  They were white, playing black music into a society which saw such things as inherently evil and, in Jerry’s case, honestly believed he’d be going to hell for doing it. Now that’s a bit worse than just upsetting mum and dad before you inevitably get down to ‘getting a proper job’ and becoming a teacher/accountant/working for the bank.

So, now we come to KD&L.

They’ve recorded an album which, as a technical exercise, is rather good. They’ve gone to the trouble of recreating the Sun/Chess/Joe Meek sound out of old equipment and performing it like how the good ol’ boys did it…. and it sounds okay.

I wanted to like what they were doing. I could see the effort they had gone to and the time they had put into it.. but in the end, I thought:

“So what was the point?”

What KD&L have succeeded in doing is making me compare them to the original recordings (which, yes, I did) and you know what? KD&L need to leave quietly and not make a fuss on the way out. What they’ve done sounds like a bunch of kids taking the piss out of rock n’ roll. Sure, it sounds sonically accurate but (like an Eagles record) that’s not really the point here. Go listen to Ike Turner playing Rocket ’88 back in 1956; these guys wanted a fucking ROCKET ’88, man! They wanted to get in it, drive round town, get wasted and fuck all night! Then, they wanted to wake up at the crack of noon… and do it all again! KD&L sound like they’re just going to nip off, when they’re done recording… and play Halo on the X-Box.

There is no fire, no passion, no love – nothing. All we are left with is a load of ‘accurate’ sounding… sounds. That’s all you’re going to ever get when you go through the motions to make something ‘sound’ right. KD&L would have been better of sticking a mic in the middle of the three of them and playing until their fingers bled, the neighbours screamed blue murder and the police were called.

I was given another album this weekend by a band called Von Haze. You can’t get hold of this one very easily, cos it’s a little bit limited.  It sounds nothing like a Sun Record, or a Chess Record but listen carefully and you can hear the passion. You can hear the ‘this is what we play and you’re going to fucking like it’ in there. This isn’t a record made to please but everyone who has heard the track Sad Girls wants to know where to get a copy. KD&L? Well, they’ll keep a certain middle-class paper reviewing stuff they don’t understand.

In short, if Eddie/Gene/Roy… and all their mates were recording today, they’d probably sound a bit like Von Haze.  KD&L would be akin to Hot Jazz… or something.

I still want my money back.

You can listen to Jordan Thomas on Recharged Radio.