When you're handed an album by the latest Transatlantic guitar slingin' rebels, accompanied by a press release gushing about influences ranging from The Stooges to Primal Scream, you certainly don't expect limp-wristed, floppy-fringed chaps pledging their love to the Sarah Records back catalogue do you?
Rhetorical question, obviously, so it's no great surprise that once "Thank You, Goodnight"s opening track "Open Your Eyes" has bled in on an ominous fug of feedback akin to the Dead Kennedys' "Dead End" that it will assemble in shape to sound like (gasp! shock horror!) a pretty close mutation of, er, The Stooges and Primal Scream - with a bit of Spiritualized (circa "Electricity") - lobbed in for good measure.
So far, so heard it all before, you say, and yeah, I can't argue that while WHITE LIGHT MOTORCADE are some way from being as revolutionary in real life as their testifyin' forebears such as the MC5 etc, they are a bloody good listen if you like your rock'n'roll (check!) cranked up, riffsmart and nasty (check!).
Indeed, while most of the album's dozen tracks do usually recall major sonic touchstones, WLM understand the dynamics of this game and thus tracks like "It's Happening" (with its' cheeky lyrical nod to "Ace Of Spades"), "Semi-Precious" (with its' ace, Who-style wall of sound intro) and "I Could Kick Myself" (punky Duane Eddy riffing fences with sneery, Jagger-ish vox in a great celebration of dumbness) are all hugely enjoyable, early 21st Century "Nuggets" writ large.
Add to these "We Come Together" and the raucous, closing "On Top" and you've got a potential killer in the sneery, snotty and snidey garage rock stakes, but White Light Motorcade clearly also have bigger dreams to chase, which is sometimes where they come unstuck.
OK, some of the diversions work well enough. "All Gone Again", for instance, dares to introduce acoustic guitars into the equation and initally recalls Led Zep's "Tangerine" before the electric slashes in at the chorus and while "Useless" can best be described as 'strung-out ethereality', it stretches into a big-slow burning anthem with squally lead guitar and comes off effortlessly.
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However, the likes of "Dream Day" and "Closest" don't escape so happily intact. The former tries to marry loops, smoky vocals a la Richard Ashcroft and a groove like late-period Stone Roses, but despite a massive meltdown of an ending never really kicks up more than a confused bluster, while "Closest" has a bit stadium rock chorus with all the bombast that implies and even some Thom Yorke-ish falsetto can't leaven that.
Potentially, though, the scariest culprit is the penultimate track, "Looking At Stars", which bizarrely apes the melody from Supertramp's "Logical Song" at the chorus (admittedly in amped-up form), which is surely accidental, but doesn't make it any easier to swallow.
Still, even allowing for such jarring faux pas as these, plus the fact that "Thank You, Goodnight" breaks precious little new ground sonically, White Light Motorcade are an agreeably noisy buncha US noiseniks, who quite clearly live, breathe, snort and excrete rock'n'roll. If you're after snotty, middle-finger protruding garage thrills, with decent production and class in tow, you could do far worse than ride into the sunset with them.
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