Plexi
Cheer Up (Atlantic)
by Nik Rainey
The great thing about being an avowed musical agnostic is that occasionally something will leap out of the miasma of limp earnestness and sick genre-hopping and justify the semi-disbeliever’s faith in rock as Rock as ROCK. It doesn’t happen often, but when a band turns the same laughable postures and farcical falsehoods which can make constant listenerhood such an ungodly chore into an edifice of artifice worth genuflecting before, it’s as if the black velvet Elvis painting in your kitsch-lined rumpus room started weeping blood: it defies logic and common sense (not to mention taste, the bane of all truly classic rock), which renders it miraculous. For at least the forty or so minutes the disc spins, you are a true believer again.
I won’t sit here and proclaim Plexi the Second Coming or nothin’ – I’ll save such wailings for my proposed review column in the Weekly World News, “Songs JFK and the World’s Fattest Infant Told Me They Like” – but a band that connects the dots between some of the cheapest thrills in rock history (’60s psych, ’70s glam, ’80s goth, and ’90s neo-psych-glam-goth) and somehow makes it matter has gotta have something holy goin’ on. It’s sonic sensationalism writ large, full-blown fakery as lush, powerful, melodramatic and meaningless (“Just like Phyllis Diller, I’m a forest ranger”?) as their platform-shod stomping grounds of Los Angeles, all Mick Ronson-unto-Daniel Ash-unto-Thurston Moore guitars and those ever-fashionable decadent lyrical touchstones plunked down in a shifting sea of symphonic noise. Even when they try to hit an R.E.M. acoustic/mandolin/violin vein on “Star Star” (the Stones-ripped title a clear sign of their aspirations to self-consciously dirty glitz), they can only bring themselves to skin-pop it, which is awright cuz it provides a nice glow without making you puke or nod out. After being let down by one would-be savior after another, I’ll happily take my gods demi and my idols false as long as their teakwood crosses are painted up nice and they swagger just right under the weight of ’em. Plexi slouches toward their backlot Jerusalem (Hollywood be thy name) better than any other rough beast that presently comes to mind. Hallelujah, babe.
