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feeling the love/AMPLIFIED!! Juanita and the Rabbit The Raveonettes, more so than The White Stripes, had the chance to be the minimalist musician’s wet dream, having first started off by recording their debut EP Whip It On entirely in B-flat minor and proverbially issuing a decadent rejection of conventionalism. Unfortunately The Raveonettes staggered so much into the corporate muck they eagerly prospected to disavow on their weak-kneed Pretty in Black they’ve yet to recover from it despite better efforts since.
As garage rock and contemporary punk has slid out of the hands of purists and into the new-wave-revived hipster clubs of Generation Tech, you have to dig a little harder to find the meat. You can turn to Today is the Day since Steve Austin is always reliable in keeping things on the hair’s edge, and there’s a ton of ultra-schway groovies jamming on Sirius’ Underground Garage.
However, if you’re looking to further distance yourself from pseudo punk brat chic, you might want to turn your ear canals towards San Francisco’s Juanita and the Rabbit. As dirty and in the raw as a crumpled bed sheet full of crusting jizz, this husband and wife duo clunk with the bare essentials ala Flipper without the latter’s flagrant sonic bedlam.
At their best, Juanita and the Rabbit tosses a Pixies-meets-Dinosaur, Jr. alt punk salad (ala “The Welcome,” “Time of Our Life” and “Last Lady Pt. 1” ), while at other times they just plug in and slap down hollow note patterns, such as on their rap-scat chunk spew, “Turn Up the Heat.”
Brett and Elizabeth Cline have no qualms in socking it to the mainstream on “Young Man,” which skids to a ridiculous crash (assuredly intentional) filled with profanity and deformation shortly following Brett Cline’s venomous edict “I’m not a wise man, but I can smell a corporate whore.” Immediately thereafter, Brett (who at times sounds like a calamitous merge between Frank Black and Lou Reed) mutters “So hip I think I’ll be sick, it doesn’t help you smell like shit” before he and Elizabeth throttle out the beat-heavy “So Hip.”
The Clines bravely take on Bill Withers’ melancholic seventies’ classic “Ain’t No Sunshine” and strips it down to bare recognition, as Elizabeth Cline croons along to Brett’s lucid bass lines and Katie Friedman’s groaning cello in the background.
Juanita and the Rabbit might likely require a few spins before you begin to appreciate their trashcan savoir faire, but feeling the love / AMPLIFIED!! is a blunt and immediate bitchclap upon your ears, even as it shambles off with an agreeable punker’s two step on the final track “Change it Now!”
If you’re feeling like there’s a slowly-gestating trend of two-member (specifically of the gal ‘n pal variety) garage practitioners, you’re not in the wrong. However, Juanita and the Rabbit is the inconspicuous antipop you’ll be hankering for now that Jack Black and Alicia Keys are rubbing elbows. Cool as that collaboration ended up being, it probably smells like shit to the Clines…
Ray Van Horn Jr. 0000-00-00
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