| Droog |
| I
can listen to this stuff all day. Droog are not original. They are not trailblazers. They like rock. For their new single, they, like so many before them, rewrote "Kick Out The Jams." Droog are garage rock with absolutely no pretension, pose, or anything else that gets in the way of sounding like a freight train bearing down on your skull. They play with the ferocity of the damned, or at least Murahachibu. Their MySpace page says they scared the audience at a Shimokitazawa gig. I believe them. So, the particulars. Four teenage age lads from Oita (aka the middle of goddamned nowhere. 70% of the place is forest. They have the fewest towns and villages of any prefecture in Japan.) A blurb on their site says they dropped out of High School, which may be apocryphal but which fits so well I'm going to go ahead and believe it. Droog play with the kind of abandon that has a problem fitting in anywhere, the sort of filthy rock 'n' roll that is inherently antisocial. Their debut is only 26 minutes long, but honestly, I don't know if I could handle much more. So, that aforementioned "Kick Out The Jams" rewrite. "いざさらば 書を捨てよ" ("Iza Sarabasho O Suteyo," i.e. "Goodbye, I'm Throwing It All Away") is a bit glam, a lot trashy, and utterly fantastic. Vocalist Hiroki Katayama doesn't really sing so much as wail, taunting, shouting and whining rather than hitting notes, which is perfect for not giving a shit at the top of your lungs. Speaking of which, "アイラブユー" ("I Love You") is so snotty and retarded that it's difficult to believe it's an actual love song. More likely that Katayama liked the way the syllables sounded and figured what the Hell: the song sounds more like a paean to freebasing drain cleaner. "人類" ("Jinnrui," i.e. "Anthropology") could quite easily be an attempt to explain the band's sloped foreheads, for all I know. The literal message isn't important. It's all in the delivery, and Droog have it down. While their predecessors are innumerable, Droog most remind me of another collective of small town miscreants: The Shizuoka Rock 'n' Roll Union (who they, probably uncoincidentally, share a label with.) Katayama even has a quote on the Droog site about wanting to be Mick Jagger, echoing Shizuoka R'n'R Union vocalist Sean's proclamation that he was "the Mick Jagger of Shizuoka." While the Rock 'n' Union sounded a bit more…well, incapacitated than Droog, the similarities are undeniable: fans of one will undoubtedly love the other. It's entirely possible that, like the Shizuoka outfit, Droog won't make it past this, their initial blurt of rage, snot, testosterone, and guitars. Best not to think about such things: just turn it up and look out for the police siren in "ああ絶望" ("Aazetsubou," i.e. "Ah, Despair.") Stellar stuff. |