One minute they were here. The next they were gone, withdrawing in the same lamentable fashion as a used condom after an explosive one-stand.
Strangely it seems much longer than five years since The Datsuns erupted onto the less than vital garage-rock scene, a scene that had by this point suffered the ignominy of The Stroke’s second album, the rise and fall of Andrew W.K, the continued pruning of The Vines and the superfluous entry of fellow cut-throat New Zealanders, The D4. Arriving at the tail end of a party that had already flatlined some12 months earlier, The Datsuns burned bright and burned out. There was a flurry of hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-scorned-bitch-queen singles (‘Harmonic Generator, ‘Motherfucker From Hell’), a couple of albums (‘The Datsuns’ and the appropriately titled, ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’), an appearance at Ozzfest, a second album produced by Zeppelin’s John-Paul Jones, heaps of praise from Metallica’s Lars Ulrich – but nothing was enough to save them. Nothing, that is until now.
The new album gets a jump-lead start with ‘Human Error’ – a fiery and faintly glamish, foot to the floor tonsil banger that sees frontman, Dolf de Borst, rioting around the mic-stand shouting something about a ‘death wish’ and thumping his tub like the proverbial motherfucker from hell. And then it pretty much proceeds as it means to go on; a prickly and fairly punky and decidedly less stodgy drill of thrashing Ozz-core tunes offset by the occasional gothic nightmare like ‘Eye of the Needle’ and disturbed scruffy glam like ‘Highschool Hoodlums’.
Old band, fresh ambitions.
