Want a more legitimate alternative to Avril Lavigne? Heck, who doesn’t? The industry is certainly trying to come up with the goods and just when you thought The Donnas looked likely to be a one-off success up pop the scruffy little alt-pop unit, Damone.
Comprising of the barely legal 17 year old, Noelle – blind in one eye and suitably obscured by a tress of nut-brown hair – Damone are the skilfully crafted peripheral to motherboard and writer, Dave Pino. The fact that the band has been moulded around this prodigious talent may suffer from the musky reek of the manufactured – but that’s how the majors like RCA work – and who can blame them? Sometimes it works pretty well, and ‘pop’, let’s face it has very little real claim to providing gut shiftingly brutal realism afterall (although it’s something it often produces at a 5 year tangent – The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Monkees – anyone bigger than the actual label). Anybody who claims ‘pop’ is anything more, is being silly, and missing the point.
What you have here (bar the ridiculously lame track, ‘At The Mall’ – a desperate attempt to market-place the band, if ever there was one) is an energetic and fun-packed mall-riot of an album – full of all the angsty teenage vibes that spill over from the bedroom and into the street and all the crass, unscheduled emotions that go along with it.
It may suffer from the obligatory slow track like ‘Leave Me Alone’ (something from the Julian Lennon school of rocking by numbers) but the Weezer-resque animation and nerd thrashing of tracks like ‘Feel Bad Vibe’ and ‘Driveway Blues’ more than make up for it.
It’s eager, it’s unkempt and it’s pretty much everything than good pop should be. With a little less precision and a little less recourse to pro tactics, I’d pop my pimples and scourge my scurvy for it anytime.