Guitar Wolf
Jet Generation (Matador)
by Jon Sarre
This record tears off with a nasty unhinged everything up up up grinding approximation of the intro to the Beatles’ “Back in the U.S.S.R” (fittingly, the opening to the White Album). Imagine an F-16 crashing into the Funhouse (where the Stooges useta live in Ann Arbor, dumbass) and Matador’s claim that Jet Generation is “the loudest CD in history” is no mere hyperbole! Christ! Noise, noise, noise! Noise to wake the dead (and thus hasten the Rapture, pleasing right-wing Christians the world over, hmmm, is that a good thing?). With all the muck, it should be no surprise that fidelity suffers (just a tad) and given that, Seiji, Billy and Turo are like the Pedro Martinezes of the whiffle ball diamond, hurling junk versus whistling fastballs (read: after five records they still substitute sheer volume for chops).
If ya don’t know already, the aforementioned three gents hail from Japan and yeah, they love the punk lock’n’loll American style, especially the Lamones and the Lunaways and Rink Wlay and probably the Herricopters (but they’re Swedes with similar infatuations with our culture, so ya can’t count them!). As with Guitar Wolf‘s last effort, Planet of the Wolves (albeit minus the comparatively impressive uh… production values), the boys again prove to be masters of turning yer standard blues-based chords into a claustrophobic mess of pops, snaps, buzzes, and screeches. Somebody let ’em run the boards themselves this time out, so it makes sense that it sounds like the studio’s shortin’ out around ’em (maybe Godzilla stopped by, I dunno).
Lo-end is so absent on the thirteen cuts here that ya’d swear there’s some sorta trade sanction against it, but they more than make do with more treble than is probably recommended by the FDA. Upon first listen, Jet Generation is like mainlining pure sonic adrenaline, but after a few spins, your overworked speakers develop a tolerance and ya begin to wonder if Guitar Wolf give a shit beyond their retro haircuts and black leather. “Soundslike”-wise, I’m reminded of the noisy rockabilly experiments of the early Volcano Suns, ‘cept without all the sophisticated recording equipment available to Sean Slade at Fort Apache studios back in 1985 (and if Peter Prescott didn’t possess a relatively extensive working knowledge of the English language). In a nutshell, it’s a sloppy approximation of “untamed rock’n’roll” with a rhythm section that attacks every song like the power’s gonna be cut any second.
Guitar Wolf tackles every track that way, whether they dumb down “Beat on the Brat” (“Fujiyama Attack”) or plagiarize “Fortunate Son” as the Cramps may have recorded it (“Cosmic Space Girl” and “Refrigerator Zero”). They kick holes in the venerable “Summertime Blues,” giving the impression they learned the song from listening to the Outsiders’ 1965 Back From the Grave version rather than Eddie Cochran’s original, or Blue Cheer’s, or the Who’s cover, or that mid-’80s Kool Aide commercial (“Kool-Aide’s got the cure for the Summertime Blues” chirps the happy Stepford Mom). What that all means is, similar to the boys’ live performances of the same song, it’s one horrible imitation of a bad bar band – and that’s either a tour de force or just another inept piece of shit. One can say the same for Guitar Wolf as a functioning group and how they relate to rock’n’roll: they’re either a wiff of fresh sweat to clear out all the fuckin’ stasis, or the most overrated buncha hucksters this decade. Neither is an easy trick to pull off these days.
(625 Broadway New York, NY 10012)
