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New York city retro-rock darlings The Strokes have been garnering all the accolades for their early-70s Gotham proto-punk, but the new crop of rock bands looking for their place in the spotlight are turning back the clock to an even earlier era: the classic garage-rock era of the mid-Sixties. Detroit duo The White Stripes have a loud-soft dynamic of screaming Animals-like blues laments and almost folkish acoustic numbers that recall British Invasion ballads. The punkier Vines and the Hives (from Sweden!) specialize in classically simple low-fidelity Kinks-style crunchers: the Hives in particular even dress the part, with a sort of B&W Mod flair.
It's easy to spot some of these guys coming, if only due to their obvious, dumb-but-fun monikers. The Brian Jonestown Massacre are, indeed, so infatuated with the Rolling Stones that they've recorded a tribute to the Stones' psych-pop period called Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request. The Deathray Davies indeed have a fixation on the Kinks' famed leader, Ray Davies, although their sound tends to be more hypnotic and they absorb a wide range of garage-pop influences. Then there's 68 Comeback, who are named after Elvis' famed NBC Special, and as you might expect, they have a stronger base in classic R&B than their contemporaries. They're well-known for covering classics like Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" and Fats Domino's "My Girl Josephine". And all of the above bands owe an acknowledged musical debt to the best garage band of all time, Tacoma titans The Sonics.
Then there are the bands who take the classic garage sound in new directions: although they use a Farfisa organ, The Delta 72 flavor their revival with 21st-century indie-rock moves, while Norman, Oklahoma's fantastic Starlight Mints mix the power-pop of the Who's earliest singles with demented turns straight out of the Pixies' songbook.
So what to make of all this? The garage-rock revival isn't even a new idea; it comes around every ten years or so (the Mid-Eighties enjoyed one very briefly). This time however, several of these bands are actually getting airplay and accolades from a status quo sick of the slickness that has embalmed modern rock. Verdict: too soon to tell yet. But this could very well be a major and promising new wave of music. And it'll be riding, as as all advances do, on the back of several old ones.
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