The Datsuns are one of those New Zealand bands who seem to have been around forever, churning out dirty garage rock, releasing well-received albums, but never seeming to do as well at home as they do abroad.
Their new album Death Rattle Boogie, the fifth the band has released, may go some way to address that problem. While it’s obviously the same band, right from opener Gods Are Bored, there seems to be an added energy and drive to the music. This may be a result of spending time apart, spread across the globe, or perhaps has more to do with singer Dolf’s recognition of the Datsun’s albums as a legacy to leave behind.
Whatever the reason, this is an easy album to get into and get hooked on. It’s going to appeal to long-time fans of the band, but should also attract new fans of raw buzzing guitars and pounding rhythms; rock and roll at its most pure. Because at its essence that’s what the Datsuns have produced in Death Rattle Boogie; it’s not music trying too hard to be technical or overawe the listener, rather it overpowers the listener with its primal rawness.
So if straight up, no nonsense rock that cries out to be played as loud as is what you’re into, then Death Rattle Boogie is going to be like Christmas come early for you.
A record that sprang from an experiment in Space and Time: The geographical Space between the four band members who all live in different parts of the world, and the short pocket of Time they had together in the same country to put something to tape.
‘The narrative of Deep Sleep is this: we got together, we wrote some songs and we recorded them in the space of ten days,’ says de Borst, ‘It was basically an experiment to see if we could do it and this is what we got, for better or worse. We had this manifesto of ‘we have to do this fast, it needs to fit within these sonic parameters, and we want to keep it simple.’’
Their almost nuclear family-like existence changed around five years ago when the four members settled in separate cities. Singer/bassist Dolf de Borst put down roots in Stockholm, Sweden, building a recording studio with Nicke Andersson (The Hellacopters, Imperial State Electric); guitarist Christian Livingstone returned to London, embracing the ways of a mad fuzz scientist and birthing his own FX pedal company, Magnetic Effects; guitarist Phil Somervell returned from Germany to Auckland, New Zealand, continuing his work as a squash coach and dabbling with other musical projects; and drummer Ben Cole, based himself permanently out of Wellington working as a session musician and playing with The Joint Chiefs and the Craig Terris Band.