JON SPENCER - Plastic Fang

Jon Spencer has always been a loner. Ever since his days in Pussy Galore, his music has been something that practically escapes everyone's grasp. Too raw and unfashionable for the purist avant-garde, an inconceivable heresy for old-school rock traditionalists, his records could potentially appeal to no one at all. And yet, it only takes five minutes at one of his inimitable shows (for once, calling it a "concert" would really be reductive), or a glimpse of him backstage, to realize that his aura is exactly that of a superstar: it's no coincidence that he remains one of the most fascinating figures of a loosely defined modern rock'n'roll scene born in the early '90s and, perhaps, still standing today.

It's no surprise, then, that "Plastic Fang" wrong-foots everyone, starting with those critics who, after the panegyrics devoted to "Acme" and "Orange", couldn't wait to glorify him all over again and instead came away empty-handed. This album isn't everything Spencer has always been. No deconstruction of traditional stylistic devices, no dissonant noise-making, no explosion of experimental chaos. More modestly, this work sets out to search for the ultimate meaning of rock'n'roll and its rudimentary, wild soul - however desecrated by a certain underlying naivety - through an orgiastic return to the essentiality of its roots, relived in an extremely simple way that is nonetheless far more modern than one might be led to believe. It's precisely the brutality of the songs, which rejects any hard rock inflection in favor of settling for the sheer approximation of sound for its own sake, that hits the mark.

Spencer's trio (two guitars and drums) is left practically running wild on its own imaginary stage, hammering away at their instruments as if nothing were written down, and the twelve tracks on the list are nothing more than improvised sessions, free as can be, built on whatever flimsy scrap of a sketch, small inconsequential pretexts, just enough to record something that can be called an album of songs. But it's above all the raw, graceless production, with that electric buzz turning each note and each beat into robotic, distorted caricatures, that brings out the taste for homemade artificiality, for a lo-fi attitude in the truest sense of the term, for the pure pleasure of performance without too many aesthetic or structural constraints. Spencer's postmodern rock'n'roll is nothing but rock'n'roll as it has always been, without sophistication, frills or redundancies, just a little bit more fake - perhaps just more kitsch - under the effect of a technology that doesn't quite mesh with the good vibrations of its legendary origins.

The manifesto is all there in the first, dazzling tracks: "Sweet n sour" delivers a rockabilly hit for acid-dosed presleyites, while "She said" revs up a stripped-down blues into a rampant chorus; the two souls then converge in "Money rock'n'roll", where the instrumental interplay becomes more studied and complex. The lycanthropic features suggested by the title of "Killer wolf" are less rough-edged than expected, and the following "Tore up and broke" sounds almost out of place, with that party-pop spirit which, aided by the background vocal choruses, recalls the Beck of "Midnite Vultures", betraying the purist intent of the whole operation.

But it's only a brief pause, and if "Hold on" tries to recreate, with background chatter and the classic introduction, with its pulsating session springing to life over some generic blues base, the inexhaustible warmth of their live shows, the reason is fairly predictable: the party is starting, for real. "Down in the beast" is the record's standout track, able to lend tension to an utterly banal riff with a taut, razor-sharp thread of electric guitar. Nothing particularly original, no brilliant idea, no masterstroke of execution: just an enormous, visceral force that explodes and implodes on itself with a charge worthy of a heavy metal track. Excitement also soars on the unrestrained "Shakin' rock'n'roll tonight", and on the following "The midnight creep", with instruments boiling over and Spencer in full flight. The curtain falls instead on "Over and over", unexpectedly lackluster: neither the soul-tinged breath of "Mother nature" nor the hard rock Stones-indebted swagger of "Mean heart" will be enough to make us forget the bacchanal we've just witnessed.

It hardly matters: the mission had already been thoroughly accomplished. And if someone pointed out that, after all, “it's only rock'n'roll”, we're more than happy to settle for that.

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27/10/2006