White Denim’s new single has a rather misleading cover, doesn’t it - especially if you’ve not heard their stuff before. Who’s this guy, and what’s his story? I was expecting some sort of melancholic Deep Southern misery from “Shake Shake Shake”, some dark sorrowful biopic of your man in the glasses and the fake dickie-bow there. I couldn’t have been more wrong, really.
I mean, seriously, what the hell is going on here? “Shake Shake Shake” is a swift arse-slapping of ludicrously sparse garage skronk-rock-punk-blues, ragged and basic, fast and viral. There’s no formal lyrics or singing - at least not if you discount the chanting of the song title and the wild-eyed call-response weirdness that opens and closes the track like some weed-crazed seventies radio singalong in Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine. The guitar wails; the bass shakes its rump; the drumkit includes gratuitous cowbell. The whole song is the aural equivalent of White Denim waving a big cardboard sign with the words “drunken good times!” written on it in felt-tip capital letters. There’s probably a little smiley face too.
It’s risky to judge from one song, of course, but White Denim seem to be one of those bands that are incredibly frustrating for music writers - because no matter how you put it down in words, you can’t make it sound like it would actually work. I’m not sure you could dance to “Shake Shake Shake” (unless just kinda flailing your limbs around with your eyes closed counts as dancing, which is what the breakneck rhythm and the chanting make me want to do), but there’s surely some wild energy crammed into this two and a half minutes of cartoon garage fun, and if the whole album’s like this I’m going to have to seek it out soon. Maybe you should too.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: blues, garage, punk, rock, Shake Shake Shake, White Denim
