Sounds From The Junkshop #74 - The D4

 

"Turn up your nose, I guess you think you're outta my class..." - The D4 - Ladies' Man

As we've discussed on SFTJ's past, if there was a benefit to the trust fund fuelled rise of bands like the Strokes, it's that the gap in the wall that suddenly opened managed to see a few genuinely good garage bands sneak through. And one of the areas which suddenly saw a lot of them spring up was Australasia where, similar to how the Saints had inadvertently piggybacked* on to the punk movement a generation before, several groups who'd been slugging it out on the bar circuit for a few years suddenly found themselves picking up legions of new fans in the UK and US. We've already discussed the Vines in this column but they were far from an isolated case as the likes of the Datsuns, Jet and our SFTJ subject today the D4 would all start picking up momentum around this time.

* NB - I say that with no disrespect to the Saints, it's just that they'd been kind of developing in isolation over in Brisbane well away from New York and London so you certainly couldn't have accused them of deliberately trying to hitch a ride on either of those scenes.

The trouble is that the boom would be short-lived as most of the bands just couldn't surf the waves of fickle fame (sorry, obvious metaphor I know) and dropped back to obscurity. As we discussed on the Vines column, they were already losing momentum badly by their second album and would never really recover as line-up instability and Craig Nicholls' volatile nature saw them fatally undermine themselves. Similarly, Jet put out a storming first album in Get Born (which we may cover in a future SFTJ) but their second turned out to be a carbon copy only not as good and spelled the beginning of the end for them while the Datsuns were a storming live band but put out a debut where the muddy production completely blunted their sound before slipping into a morass of early '70s rock clichés and fading into obscurity although to be fair their Eye To Eye album last year (Nite Songs review here) was a triumphant comeback and arguably the record they should have released back in 2002 when they had a chance of breaking through.

At least the D4 burnt bright before abruptly splitting rather than slowly sputtering out the way their contemporaries did. After two great albums, they presumably figured they'd said all they needed to say and it was better to simply sign off at the top of your game than keep fruitlessly chugging away becoming a parody of what you were at your best. Hailing from New Zealand, their sound was pretty much straight and true feral garage punk - none of yer Strokesian niceties, White Stripes indebted tedious blues noodling, Vines-style grunge influences or Jet-esque love of classic rock, just straight in pile-up with the drums and guitars, say what ya gotta say and be out again two minutes later. As someone who was a bit of a shameless '77 punk fan at the time, it's maybe not a surprise that they were the band I'd gravitated to out of the class of 2002.

I wish I had a few more war stories about the D4 but to be honest, beyond being a fan of the music my knowledge of the band is pretty sketchy - they were one of those groups who picked up plenty of good reviews in the NME and Kerrang! without anyone ever doing a full feature on them (as far as I can remember anyway) I saw them at the Leeds Festival in 2001 and supporting fellow snotty rock 'n' roll upstarts the Hives around the same time and they well and truly smashed it at both of them with the sheer energy onstage building up to closer Rock 'n' Roll Motherfucker being a real blast of fresh air among the staleness a lot of that scene had.

The group would have a number of minor hits in the UK, fourth single Ladies' Man being their biggest which agonisingly missed the Top 40 by one solitary place. Both of their albums were great stuff - their 2001 debut 6Twenty probably narrowly shades it but mainly because it was the first time I heard 'em. The originals kick like an electric shock from a loose plug and covers of Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers' Pirate Love and Guitar Wolf's Invader Ace are handled well too. Out Of My Head is pretty decent as well with the frenetic Sake Bomb (a tribute to the group's tours of Japan where they had a solid following as well) being a highlight.

The D4 would split up soon after the release of Out Of My Head - it did decent numbers in their native New Zealand but literally nowhere else and I guess they figured they'd just taken the whole thing as far as they could. Which, when you look at groups like the Vines who are still plugging away probably playing to audiences a small fraction of the size they were in their heyday, is probably the right thing to do. As of yet a reunion hasn't happened. But even so, those two albums are well worth tracking down. Simple dumb fun garage punk, it's everything half-arsed tedium merchants like the Strokes and the White Stripes could never hope to be and all the better for it. Plug in and get loose.