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Groovie Ghoulies
Re-Animation Festival
(Lookout!)
The Donnas
American Teenage Rock 'n' Roll Machine
(Lookout!)
by Michael Yockel
Rock shtick has a short radioactive half-life. For example: When was the last time you listened to late-Eighties English dipsticks Gaye Bykers on Acid's Drill Your Own Hole? Somehow, Sacramento-based schlock-rock trio Groovie Ghoulies (bassist-vocalist Kepi, guitarist Roach, drummer Panic) have persisted through — what? — four albums, including their most recent, Re-Animation Festival, blithely reconstituting straight-ahead Ramones-style riffs and beats while surgically attaching them to cartoony creature-feature lyrics.
On Festival, songwriter Kepi keeps the winking goofball factor at a fever pitch throughout: picnicking in a cemetery ("Graveyard Girlfriend"), agonizing over alien invaders ("Evading the Greys"), and, on the revved-up "Graceland," resurrecting the King ("Well, we took off like a Sabre jet for Tennessee/Pulled up to Graceland, pulled out my skeleton key/Gonna find out where he's buried, gonna dig him up/Throw his remains on the back of a truck/Perform some kind of voodoo-type ritual thing/And sit back and laugh while we watch him sing").
Kepi intones everything in a nasal deadpan, Roach stokes the melody with relentless chords, and Panic drops cymbal bombs every few beats: in short, Ramones-a-rama. Additionally, the Ghoulies Ramonize Daniel Johnston's "To Go Home" and cover Wilson Pickett's R&B ballad "If You Need Me," although they appear to be working from the Rolling Stones' 1964 version of the same song. Good for some grins certainly, but all the innate horror-show bumptiouness and lowbrow sanctification in the universe won't coax a one-trick pony to perform more than one trick.
As for the Donnas, current pet rocks of the music press, well, on their truth-in-advertising second album American Teenage Rock 'n' Roll Machine, the quartet of adolescent girls from Palo Alto, California, tumbles through ten tunes in 24-plus minutes, suturing the Ramones' aural bedrock to the Runaways' randy sensibilities. Key phrases: "checking it out," "rock, rock, rock and roll," "looking for some party action," and "c'mon and stick it in." Memo to Gary Glitter's attorney: Give a close listen to "You Make Me Hot." Sound a bit like "Do You Wanna Touch Me?" or what? (Lookout! Records, P.O. Box 11374, Berkeley, CA 94712-2374)