The D4 - Out Of My Head

Thu 17th Mar, 2005 in Music Reviews

The D4 are a hard-working band. Since their first album came out, the garage revivalists have toured relentlessly, scoring some tasty support slots – they next head to Europe for the enviable job of opening for The Hives – and they’ve cultivated quite a stage show, usually involving crowdsurfing guitarists and speaker-stack-scaling solos. They’ve also had to contend with pretty vituperative reviews from some quarters, dismissing the band as bandwagon-jumpers when they were amongst the first of the recent crop of rockers to ply their particular line of foot-down rockin’.

So how has the band’s second salvo shown this? What exactly has changed since the band dropped 6Twenty? The answer is simple: not much at all. There’s been no enormous leaps of artistic vision, but that’s just fine: were you expecting the band to be releasing a disc that’s heralded by stage-shows requiring inflatable pigs or a bunch of accompanying Senegalese musicians? Indeed not. The four-piece have created an album that sounds like it could’ve been cut from the same cloth of its predecessor, while being a little more well-tailored. There’s not broad differences between the albums, but the ones that are there are particularly specific, and make the band’s musical mission that little bit more effective. What’s obvious, though – given the various recording locations and producer credits of the album – is that this is an album that’s been laboured over for quite some time. And it shows: the production is uniformly strong, with a slightly ballsier feel overall than 6Twenty.

Sake Bomb opens the album with an apropos air-raid siren of a riff, before blasting into verses about alcoholic concoctions. Complete in under two minutes, it’s the perfect warm-up for the disc – and a tune so good that the band decided to record it in Japanese, too; a variant that’s included later in the tracklisting for your listening oddness. The uni-pisshead, anything-goes mentality of the song is nailed to the floor, however, by the album’s titular track, a jerky, no-chord chunk-heavy hymn to the desire to get off-chops. What’s interesting with that, though, is that the search is dismissed as ultimately destructive:

sings vocalist Jimmy, just before a guitar solo that sounds like a rendition of an end-of-night gutter vomit.

Two other songs worth examining in this downbeat vein are What I Want and Trust Nobody. They’re both remarkably downcast – something that’s a relatively recent colour to the band’s lyricism. What I Want is a near-nihilistic tune, with its protagonist who can’t decide from any of life’s options:

Cross the street
I could stay on this side
Play on your team
Or keep playing for mine

intercut with a chorus that merely repeats the line

I don’t know what I want

It’s a particularly honest look at confusion, that’s quite some distance from tracks like Party. Trust Nobody, on the other hand, is a little more pissed off – in it, the band’s description of life as being essentially shithouse is couched in a snarl, and a bassline that sounds like it escaped from The Cramps.

I keep on confusing
The line between fiction and fact
They got smiles they don’t mind using
While they sharpen up the knives for your back

A bit heavy, that? Well, yes, but the music is buoyant and forward-moving enough to carry you through the lyrical downer. The ability to knock out a tune to make you dance is something that the band haven’t lost, and the album’s full of songs that just beg to be slamdanced to: Feel It Like It, the gangster-grinned Omerta and the hard-beaten Do No Right sound like they were purpose-built for smoky-pub jukeboxes.

An opening riff that sounds a little close to Electric Six’s Gay Bar marks Peepshow, one of the album’s most high-octane tracks. A story of being dumped for dancing, it’s a quick study of desperation, and it’s got a whole section composed solely of the line

Shakin’ that ass! Shakin’ that ass!

which is pure good-time gold, as The Artist Who At One Point Was Known As Prince would tell you.

The number of covers on this album has been whittled down on Out Of My Head. Out Of Control, the Lime Spiders tune, is given a spirited workout, and it’s easy to see exactly how much lead the Kiwi quartet have taken from that group. The almost-cack-handed soloing on the track more readily communicates the band’s enthusiasm for the material than any number of raved-up “woo!” shout-outs ever could; there’s a feeling that the musicians are almost tripping over themselves to get the song out, and that element of hacking-a-tune-out-on-a-tennis-racquet-in-front-of-a-mirror is particularly endearing.

Back on the side of the original, it must be noted that Too Stupid is one of the best tracks The D4 have released. Opening with precise, bludgeoning guitar slashes that soon become a wah-rocked melody, the song’s lamentation of the world’s dullards is laced with strong acid

I don’t know how you people survive
You’re too stupid to be left alive
So many, so many stupid people in this town
Don’t get me wrong – I’m talking to you!

Could this be aimed at bitching critics? Possibly. Regardless, it’s the sort of song that you suspect Morrissey would have given his best gladioli to have written.

The band’s most important moment of musical growth comes on the slow-burning track Stops Me Cold. Bluesy and opened by doors shutting, it’s got a late-night feel (replete with burning organ) which befits its tale of stalkerly love. There’s a sense of roleplaying, but also a sense of nakedness here – and to the band’s credit, they don’t smother the song. Allowing the arrangement to breathe makes lyrics like

Take on more menace than they would normally. It stands out amongst the hyperactivity of the group’s usual work purely because of its lack of speediness – except in the moments where the guitars kick in with squeals of sexually-frustrated anguish – and as such, it feels like a real turning point for The D4.

Though both bands are probably tired of being compared, it’s useful to look at Out Of My Head in parallel with The Datsuns’ Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind. The latter band’s second platter landed more like a third disc: they eschewed reinforcement of their particular style, and instead moved into a world of textural development – of pursuit of sounds. As such, Out Of Sight, Out Of  Mind sounded a little too overworked, too reaching – a little more like a third album than a second disc. The D4, on the other hand, aren’t doing anything here that’s wildly different from 6Twenty – but they’re doing it with more sureness, in a more accomplished manner. True, Out Of My Head is a swag of what are ostensibly party songs, but it’s also a bit deeper than that, should you care to look.

It’s interesting: Out Of My Head is an album that’s full of youthful truculence, of elastic-bassed anger, of garage-gritted rebellion. But at the same time, it’s an album that charts the ennui and false bravado of teens and twenties: Peepshow’s narrator only has female interaction at the local peel joint, Rocknrule is the cry of the shunned schoolkid who knows that he’ll rock the world someday, the protagonist of What I Want is unable to decide how to live, while Trust Nobody’s angry voice wears the hard shell of isolationism – the sense that if one can’t be touched, one can’t be hurt. It’s a curiously youthful, almost teenaged narrative voice that runs through this group of songs, skipping through the addictive melodies and sweat-strung rhythms. No, they’re not Shakespearean lines, but they exhibit a little of the change that the band’s been going through, a little bit of the growth.

Read as a questing melancholic throwing a finger to the world, or simply as a hard-rocking, low-tech and high-energy garage-styled album, Out Of My Head deserves a listen. As with much rock, it’s not earthshatteringly different from what’s gone before, but it’s a good testament to the continued development of The D4’s craft. They’re the sort of band who manage to make party-boy rock that’s enviable for the fact that you don’t want to punch them while they’re doing it. And, at day’s end, they’re good, sweaty fun - with a bit of a dark side. And what more reason to listen should you need?