With a hard and heavy drum sound akin to hammer kissing anvil and the vicious cut and thrust of what sound like literally dozens of cantankerous fuzz guitars, New Zealand’s D4 lead an amphetamine charged assault on your ears with their full-length debut release, 6 Twenty.
Fronted by the unlikely named Jimmy Christmas and singer/guitarist Dion, it could be suggested the D4 are little more than a down and dirtier cousin of mock garage rock-tarts, The Hives : easier on novelty value, heavier on the mics – but with due regard to the pretty decadent approach to drum fills and frantically, tearing bass-runs this is a little more nasty.
With titles like ‘RocknRoll MotherFucker’, ‘Party’ and ‘Ladies Man’ it may seem like they’re cruising through every rock cliché in the book, but beneath the shock tactics and the unsophisticated nonce breathes a surprisingly authentic beast. And whilst there’s no denying they’re likely to be no more than a timely and momentary success in a worryingly ‘brit-popish’ fashion craze, it’s refreshing all the same. The Datsuns have their psychedelic and preposterous punk intellectualism, The Libertines have their uniforms, the Hives have their skinny ties, the Donnas have their sanitary towels and the D4 have their noize. In fact 2003 is more like 1964 than 1964. Everyone’s got a gimmick – everyone’s got a dance and everyone’s successfully niched themselves into separate areas of the same market. Cynicism aside though, this is a great hard party record and a fair and accurate representation of back to basics rock. Supergrass perfected supercharged pop with 1995’s ‘I Should Coco’ whilst heralding the decline of Brit-Pop. I dare say ‘6 Twenty’ represents a similarly penultimate phase in garage-rock. With any luck