January 6, 2003

The Datsuns : Milan Club Alcatraz

...it's hard to keep a straight face while your brains are being sucked out through the your cock/c--- (delete where appropriate)...

Phwooooooar! What is it good for? The Datsuns are raw sex. Chopped liver, wearing suspenders, on Viagra. How can you not like The Datsuns? How can you carp and sneer and parsimoniously nit-pick when every inch of your hot and throbbing body is screaming - 'Take me! Take me NOW!'? Like - do they turn you on? These brightly burning, tightly trousered tygers of ker-DANG!? Or what? And - be honest - OF COURSE they do. Unless you're dead. Or sexless. Or both. It's a libido thing, baby, a cock and c--- thing - not a head thing, not a chin-stroking, brow furrowing, finger wagging, waffle-gobbed intellectual thing. You gimp!

The Datsuns rock like motherfuckers from hell. And all opinion to the contrary is petty spite, jealous lies and maliciously dissembling wank. This crowd of jaded Milano sophisticates have to be sweet-talked, stroked and seduced. Which the middle-of-the-bill Datsuns do the only way they know how - by immediately getting buck naked and waving their elephantine wangers in the crowd's face and screaming "Well do you want some or what!?"

Metaphorically speaking.

It's the only language The Datsuns understand. The language of heavy rock (it's NOT, for heaven's sake, heavy metal, let's get that straight). And, yes, even with your eyes wide open they sound exactly like AC/DC, Led Zep and Deep Purple. And this is meant to be a bad thing? For this they are derided? Are you mad? The burning truth, however, is that Led Zep (the most obvious template) were only ever occasionally and intermittently this good. The Datsuns have ditched the flowery wank and cod-intellectual ho-hummery that made the dinosaurs they hold in awe such easy meat for the savage little punk rock monkeys that destroyed them. What you get here - from the blissful 'Sittin' Pretty' through the sublimely ridiculous 'Harmonic Generator' to the gut-rock of 'Freeze Sucker' - is a totally intoxicating 100% proof distillation of all that was truly wonderful about the gory glory daze of the eardrum damaging and dandruffed-to-fuck best-of-British cock rock.

And being the very embodiment of this 4 chord, 3 colour, 2 fisted and single-braincelled rock organism, The Datsuns are inevitably and tediously dismissed as a "cartoon" band. Again - are you mad? Are you totally fucking insane? All the very best bands have always been artistically implosive self parodies (which is why The Gorillaz are so much more fun that Blur). And The Datsuns - these Rolling Flintstones, these Hanna-Barbarians - are essentially Josey And The Pussy Cats. With cocks. And bollocks. And a bulging sack of killa chewns.

The Datsuns live are a crudely choreographed cartoon car crash. Singer Dolf is a doe-eyed, raven-haired wet dream. Superskinny axe-spanker Christian trembles like Jimmy Page on day one of a multi-substance cold-turkey rehab. And, eventually, even suspicious, seen-it-all-before Milan succumbs. Inevitably - because it's hard to keep a straight face while your brains are being sucked out through the your cock/c--- (delete where appropriate).

Steven Wells