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One of the more annoying critical tropes is the "rock is dead" gambit. I find it really annoying, when there's always more music than anyone has time to listen to, which means that judgments about the overall state of the music are worthless - since how do you know the 9,000 recordings you didn't hear wouldn't blow the 1,000 you did right out of the water? Still, I admit that sometimes I've wondered whether rock really was dead. Yes, there's lots of good music - but rock'n'roll? Not pop, not indie-rock, not art rock, not 'lectronautics, nothing with a hyphen in its name - just rock'n'roll. It seemed to have devolved into dumbass generic AOR, willfully stupid metal, revivalist shtick, or pointless posturing involving "rebellion," hairstyles, and tattoos. But rock'n'roll has never been essentially about rebellion, or even about being fifteen (although it can be), it's about a spirit, a feeling, an intensity, that isn't really limited by any of the invisible electric fences that delineate genres. Directness, intensity, beauty, desperation, tenderness - country, R&B, soul all share these with rock'n'roll, and genre distinctions are useful only for marketers. (Historical note: Elvis topped the pop, country, and R&B charts simultaneously, with the same songs.) So it's nearly miraculous that the Rock*a*Teens (or R*A*T*S, to use their preferred abbreviation) can be so utterly rooted in the virtues of classic rock, soul, and R&B but manage to avoid even the faintest whiff of revivalism. This is music that breathes, sweats, and sighs, not a reanimated corpse manipulated from offstage by bellows and electrical switches. And there's not an audible hyphen around, either. Part of this is the band's reckless, noisy enthusiasm, which allows it to throw in more or less leftfield items like mellotrons or the piano recorded through an air-conditioning duct on "In the Woods of Hemlock Park." And another part is Chris Lopez, who's simply one of the better rock singers around - precisely because he's not one of the better singers around: his grasp of pitch is dubious, and he sounds as if he's shouted himself raw. Basically R*A*T*S prove that sometimes the best music can sound as if the band just hurled themselves at their instruments, tired, drunk, pissed-off, horny, frustrated but somehow triumphant. In that setting, who cares what's in tune? Not that the band are a bunch of primitives: these songs are clever, solid, and not maybe as simple as they seem, and the band is capable of incorporating clever, ear-catching sounds that don't sound out of place or self-consciously "innovative" (pat me on my newfangled back, please). I have no idea whether R*A*T*S looks to the venerable (critspeak for "bunch of old geezers") Mekons for inspiration, but they might as well, since that band shares many of R*A*T*S's virtues. While the younger band lacks the Mekons' political edge, both have that rare combination of fire, daring, and humor. The Mekons' latest collection of odds and sods compiles rockers like the title track or the scorching live version of the anguished political rant "This Funeral Is for the Wrong Corpse," a couple of globe-straddling numbers like the reggae/zydeco "Betrayal," country-tinged weepies like "The Ballad of Sally" (sung, of course, by its namesake, the honey-voiced Sally Timms), along with a generous selection of weird, sometimes hilarious, sometimes affecting oddities like "Oranges and Lemons" and "Now We Have the Bomb." And their cover of Rod Stewart's "You Wear It Well" reminds us that once upon a time, Stewart was more than a sad punchline to a poor joke. Only a handful of these tracks have been released elsewhere, and many of them are pretty damned essential for any Mekons fan: the title track showed up on the b-side of a British 3-inch CD (remember those?) and was for some reason left of the U.S. release of Rock 'n' Roll, the original version of "Funeral" was on the British-only release Curse of the Mekons, "Born to Choose" was the title track of the pro-choice Rykodisc compilation a few years back, and a studio version of "Lucky Star" was on Retreat from Memphis. Look - you can't go wrong with the Mekons. And it's beginning to look like you can't go wrong with the Rock*a*Teens either.
More R*A*T*S: Cry; Baby, A Little Rain Must Fall
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