perfidy

I’ve been on a freaky 70's and 80’s trip recently. Maybe it started around the time Reagan checked out, I don’t know, but for the last few weeks I’ve been pulling out my old early Replacements records, Def Leppard, Stooges, Ramones, Televison, Run-DMC, Cheap Trick… about the only thing I haven’t done is regrow my mullet and buy a Scorpions T-Shirt. I’m pretty sure I already have the acid-washed jeans and skinny tie somewhere in the bottom of my closet.

Part of it is that music is seasonal for me: I spend springtime in Funkadelphia, winter is for crooners and Europop, fall is all Tom Waits all the time unless it’s Neil Young, but summer, summer is for funtime only. A couple weeks ago I was blessed with the Sahara Hotnights new album, "Kiss & Tell," and finally after a slow rainy June I am pleased to find that funtime is here again.

I first heard Sahara Hotnights about a year ago. I was in my car on a rainy Saturday, ready to spend a hungover afternoon at the mall shopping for work clothes and casting wistful looks at Chelsea boots by Aldo and Kenneth Cole. The local community station was in the middle of a punk hour I kind of like, so I was enduring some vague thrashy surf-metal by a band from Saugus or Winnepesaukee or someplace when the surf bleat was preempted by this awesome girly funtime sound! which was back-announced as being from Sahara Hotnights’ second album, 2002’s “Jennie Bomb.” They were so good I almost drove off the road.

I never really heard from them again. A series of lean months spent prioritizing rent and lentils over music purchases relegated the band to marginally-remembered status. I remember bringing their name up once or twice to people as examples of Whats New and Hott, but mostly I felt wistful like I’d hooked up with the band at a bar, hit it off great, and lost their number in the laundry. Now just in time for high summer, Sahara Hotnights have returned to my life with “Kiss & Tell.”

Here’s what I know about Sahara Hotnights. They’re Swedish, like Abba. They’re four girls, like the Donnas. Two of them are sisters, like the Ramones, and that gets the inevitable comparisons out of the way. Yes they’re Swedish, yes they are rock chicks, and yes they have a way with buzzsaw guitar and a hook. But really, they’re so much more!

It’s a lasting tribute to the quality of the underlying material of rock and roll that it can withstand endless repetition and still remain worthwhile. Genres rise, prosper, wither and die, and their remains are reincorporated into the DNA of rock to be used again by future bands: Chuck Berry begat The Rolling Stones begat Aerosmith begat Van Halen begat Guns N Roses begat Alice In Chains ‘n’ so on world without end. Sahara Hotnights, like so many great bands before them, don’t so much carve out new territory as live in abandoned houses. And that’s fine; most days I’d rather listen to Def Leppard do “Hysteria” than PIL do “Metal Box” anyway. In particular, the Hotnights seem to have boned up on their Bangles, Runaways and Joan Jett, Cheap Trick, Go-Gos, and Cars, with hinted suggestions at a Clash and B-52s record or two somewhere and a lasting affection for Rick Derringer’s “Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo.” That the Hotnights pull this off without sounding stale is a tribute to both their astute choice of influences and to their considerable ability to write a hook, bang a drum, and bash a guitar. Like I said, I dig freaky retro trips.

From what I’ve already written, you’ve probably decided whether you feel like giving the album a chance or not, so I could be phenomenally lazy and wrap up without even talking about the music, about the fat two-guitar attack that opens “Who Do You Dance For?” giving way to a heavily chorused single-note guitar line and a fantastic Go-Gos-stylee vocal that builds within 45 seconds to a chorus made for driving with the windows down and the radio cranked. Or the way that vocalist Maria Andersson’s faint Swedish accent makes her muscular vocals super cute. Or the exuberant drive of the first single “Hotnight Crash,” that somehow manages to simultaneously evoke Television, Cheap Trick, and Sleater-Kinney without the caterwauling. Or they way that “Nerves” wouldn’t sound out of place on a B-52s or Pretenders record. Or the way that “Empty Heart” kind of sounds like the great lost track from Cheap Trick’s “In Color/In Black and White.” Or the way that echoes of the Clash’s “Safe European Home” sit comfortably alongside nods to Susanna Hoffs. Or the way that the Spirit of St. Joan of Jett infuses the whole proceedings. But I won’t do that because it would mean I wouldn't be able to impress upon you the sheer breathless impact with which Sahara Hotnights pull all these influences together into a loud, poppy, shiny, swaggering whole.

Bottom line: if you like albums that sound good with the windows down and the sun shining, and miss that feeling from when you were a kid where every song on a new album felt like an awesome new discovery, “Kiss & Tell” will get you off. I’ve had it on auto-repeat almost nonstop for a week, and after sixty or so listens, I’m starting to think I’ve found the Funtime Champion of 2004.