The Datsuns

Description

Hitching the sound of Antipodean rock forebears such as AC/DC, the Saints and the Scientists onto the stripped-back blues howl of the White Stripes and Detroit garage rock, Cambridge New Zealand rockers the Datsuns are men with no fear of cliché. In their gloriously simplistic world, riffs are basic and sludge heavy, guitar solos heroic and often utterly unnecessary and lyrical concerns don't stretch much beyond bad women who've done these volume-addled longhairs great unspecified wrong. A song like "MF from Hell" gives a decent idea of the Datsuns' template: guitars chug as brows furrow, singer Dolf De Datsun (Joey and Dee Dee Ramone would surely approve!) spits out a high pitched yelp, and the! chorus is big, dumb and excellent fun. There are touches of Mudhoney ("Lady" is basically "Touch Me I'm Sick 2002"), Thin Lizzy ("What Would I Know" apes their Jailbreak era), and any band who've formed without thinking much beyond booze, girls and sleeping in a ditch after a perfect show. Not rocket science, then, but if you wanted a lost weekend of full-on debauchery then the Datsuns would win over every time. --Ian Watson