Once, The New York Dolls (along with The Heartbreakers) represented all that was best and bawdiest about the primordial NYC punk scene; they were loud-mouthed, swinging, swaggering queens that nobody wanted to fuck with because they had the dangerous chops to back up their bravado. The band epitomized a romantic image of balls-out rock n' roll in a sea of Eagles/Steely Dan sexless simpiness; David Johansen, Sylvain “Sylvain” Mizrahi, Johnny Thunders, Arthur “Killer” Kane and Billy Murcia had great big Chinese rocks that they needed to get off under the guise of love – LUV – which never left a dry seat in the house.
Once, The New York Dolls were the band that had it all and used it to ignite a legend.
Once.
Now, it has been five years since the three surviving (at that time) members returned to the stage with the same show to prove they could still work it. It has been a great nostalgia trip that has proven to be incredibly lucrative; live DVDs have been authored and critically celebrated, a studio album was tepidly received in 2006 and Morrissey has championed them again in what can only be regarded as a most manipulative mid-life crisis.
Now, five years after Arthur Kane permanently left the stage and three founding members became two, The New York Dolls have returned with a sophomore album featuring the band's reconstituted line-up (Steve Conte on guitars, Brian Delaney on drums and Sami Yaffa on bass) to see if the trick can work twice.
Now.
While comparisons will probably vary and veer from surprisingly positive to embarrassingly negative ('Cause I Sez So sounds about as much like the original Dolls as the current, casino-playing incarnation of the Sex Pistols sounds like they did in the Seventies), but the truth is that 'Cause I Sez So isn't a bad step at all for the Dolls. Trading that vaunted, teetering swagger for a (usually) more mature strum, the band leaves most of the wisecracks at home and tries its hand at actual songwriting with surprisingly good results. In songs like “Lonely So Long,” “Better than You” and “My World” (which sounds like the best song The Who never wrote), Steve Conte turns the distortion pedals off and lets Johansen step forward with some surprisingly adept lyricism that steps outside of his carnal box and shows that he does indeed have more than one subject in him to write about. In the title track, “Muddy Bones” and This Is Ridiculous” too, Conte showcases that he's learned how to walk just like Keith Richards into the career salvation history books by losing the sardonic irony that always characterized Dolls' music in favour of a comparatively reserved (against the sloppier side of The Dolls – which, let's be honest, is the only side we've seen before) vintage rock n' blues swing; it's all pretty far from the irony first, libido second, fashion third, songwriting a distant fourth formula that was the band's norm before. The effect is remarkable – the theory that you can't teach an old dog new tricks is utterly disproven by 'Cause I Sez So and the album will find even the most biting cynics nodding their approval in time to the music.
Artist:
New York Dolls online
New York myspace
Album:
'Cause I Sez So is out now and available here on Amazon .
