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Album Review by Jay Ruttenberg
The Donnas - American Teenage Rock `n' Roll Machine (Lookout)
As a general rule, any band who kick off their recording with an underage lass yelping "Rock and roll machine/I'm an American teenage raider" over a nasty guitar crunch and tinny beat are on to something. The four young women who sport the matching Donnas t-shirts do just this on their second album, a snazzy, boisterous romp that solidifies their status as the Bay Area's finest she-Ramones while acknowledging a growing Runaways affinity.
In concert, the band compensate for this rather limited musical palette with truckloads of charm, mostly by regurgitating rock clichÈs with the level of enthusiasm that made the moves fun in the first place. The singer self-consciously bops about, the guitarist and bassist play back-to-back (a sight I thought my stomach could never again handle after I saw Urge Overkill do it), the beat remains brisk, the shirts match, and everybody leaves with smiles on their faces and sweat on their brows.
American Teenage Rock `n' Roll Machine falls a little short of capturing all this taut energy, but it comes much closer -- given the recent track record of recorded pep punk--than one might expect. A healthy chunk of this success stems from singer Donna A. Her voice is as bratty and insistent as the best cuddlecore vocalists, but at least over the course of this fittingly brief record (10 songs in under 25 minutes), it never grows quite as irksome as, say, Cold Cold Hearts/Bratmobile or Crayon/Tullycraft. Plus, her lyrics are pure teen poetry: "I don't wanna read this book no mo'/I Just wanna go to the rock `n' roll show/So gimme my radio, gimme my radio!" she demands while the band speed away; "I don't wanna be a weekend kid/I want to party whenever I can!" she asserts; "I know what I want tonight, and I see it coming up the street/I'm going over and I'm only seven-te-eee-een," she points out, adding that she "knows about getting it on" and she "has a little sister and I'm gonna teach her how!"
The Donnas have style and a knack for snappy riffs, but it's no coincidence that these passages all revolve around that perennially hip teenage phrase "I want...."