On De Nova, their second album (and major-label debut),
the Redwalls deliver ’60s-era blues-based Brit rock with an
audacity peculiar to the very young and the not-so-terribly bright.
The quartet’s fetching mop tops, mod-inspired duds, and
shameless pilfering of the classics suggest one of the following
possibilities: (1) It never occurred to them that they’re
from Deerfield, Ill., not Liverpool, England; (2) no one ever told
them that it’s highly uncool to emulate guys who are as old
as their grandpas — unless, of course, those old guys are
drug-addled recluses or illiterate drunken bluesmen; (3) the brain
trust at Capitol has decreed that it’s high time the pretty
boys quit making like it’s 1984 and start making like
it’s 1964. If the ’80s are the new ’70s, and the
early-’90s grunge revival doesn’t look too promising
(thank heaven for small favors!), what’s left to do but go
backward, back to the days when there was an actual youth culture
and said youth actually bought records?
That’s a cynic’s perspective,
though, about as mean and as meaningless as the aspersions of
cranky zinesters and record-store dudes, who, when introduced to
the Redwalls, will no doubt snipe, “Yeah, I liked that band a
long time ago, back when they were called the Beatles.” Truth
be told, the Redwalls do sound an awful lot like the Beatles, even
though they also sometimes sound like the Faces, the Stones, Bob
Dylan, and even some totally cutting-edge new bands such as, uh,
Oasis and the Black Crowes. It’s easy to be cruel when
you’re wrinkly and bitter, easy to denigrate the
unselfconscious passion of the earnest, easy to forget that the
Beatles and all of their peers borrowed liberally from their
elders, too.
The Redwalls, on the other hand, are ridiculously
young — the senior member, guitarist/singer Logan Baren, is 22,
and half the band can’t even drink legally. Sure, they’re
derivative, and maybe it’s a tad condescending to excuse them for
this on the grounds of youth: The Beatles and most of the other bands
that make up the Redwalls’ sound pastiche weren’t much
older when they redefined rock for a new generation. But originality is
in short supply these days, and ripping off the Beatles —
especially when a band does it as competently and as pleasurably as the
Redwalls do — is no worse than ripping off Gang of Four, Wire,
the Stooges, or any number of other currently fashionable influences.
With their bar-band joie de vivre, their blowsy horn sections, their hook-happy song
structures, and their delectable harmonies, the Redwalls understand
that pop music is all about the pleasure principle: writing songs that
kids want to sing in cars, make out to at prom, blast in their bedrooms
to drown out their nagging parents. Moreover, they show a surprising
and all-too-unusual political consciousness. Where most of their Blender-friendly peers
affect a jaded disregard for such matters, the Redwalls, bless their
little retro hearts, are penning diatribes against the FCC (the
profanity-laced “Falling Down”) and antiwar ballads (the
thrilling “Glory of War,” a devastating, Dylanesque
reminder that kids the Redwalls’ age and younger are dying every
day in a fraudulent war perpetrated by liars and oil profiteers). Of
course, they’re not above the time-tested hormone bomb, the silly
love song, the goofy paean to teenage kicks — could a band of
thirtysomethings even get away with song titles such as “Rock
& Roll” and “Hung Up on the Way I’m
Feeling”? Probably not, but who cares? As a famous sexagenarian
proclaimed, oh so many years ago, “The kids are alright.”
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2005.
