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Damone conjures nostalgia
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, March 6, 2003
Media Credit: Damone photo courtesy of RCA
"I'm rocking a BMX bike ... I freestyle wherever I go. I don't cry when I fall down," 17-year-old Noelle LeBlanc sings in a smoothly overproduced punk girl voice on the first track of Damone's first release, "From the Attic."
This line may very well be sending you to the attic, if your parents have cleared out your childhood bedroom and packed your Cheap Trick posters, tape collection, high school knickknacks and skateboard into reused cardboard boxes, clam shelled or bound with duct tape.
Damone is yet another spawn of nostalgia rock invading the mainstream, armed with the fact that history repeats itself and waves of phantom nostalgia exist somewhere in our universe, waiting to infect our brains even if we never experienced the period being relived (I don't even have a Cheap Trick poster).
Although the return of Damone's high school lovesick getting high and goofing off rock may be more easily explained than the regurgitation of 60s psychedelia by the Swedish (ala Soundtrack of Our Lives), which decade Damone is regenerating is difficult to determine.
When I play this album I think it somehow escaped "Empire Records" or "Can't Hardly Wait" and reflects the teen flick that Hollywood aimed at my youthful and impressionable mind and wallet back in those idyllic nineties (remember the nineties?).
When critic Jason Pettigrew reviewed the same album for the Alternative Press, he heard the soundtrack from any number of teen films made in the late 70s and early 80s, branding Damone "best new band of 1976." This goes to prove the somewhat troubling extent of Damone's ambiguity.
The songs for "From the Attic," were written by guitarist Dave Pino in between 1996 and 1997 when Pino was 18 and obsessing over an ex-girlfriend. By taking Pino's lovesick rants and swapping gender pronouns, they became the saga of a high school girl in the present day.
So we have a teenage girl in the year 2003 singing songs written by a teenage boy in 1996 in a band named after a character in a 1982 film, (Damone is the name of a character in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High") with a rock format that evokes the 70s, 80s and 90s. This results in the pop music equivalent of an ink blot test, listen to the album and you'll hear your high school years, or at least what you always thought your high school years would be like.
But this realization isn't necessarily a drawback. At the root of these snappy power-chord rockers is the instinctual urge to silence the music critic within and just sing along with the chorus of hook-peppered gems like "On my Mind" (O-wah-ee-a-oh cuz you're mine).
But the lasting effect of these infectious pop escape-tunes may not be any longer than their three minute song lengths. You can only listen to this album for so long before you have to take the headphones off and face the reality of your job, your school work and the cold hard truth that (sadly) high school is over.
You can argue that any great album offers an escape if nothing else. But artists of more substance have the ability to take you into their world, rather than send you teary-eyed back into the early nineties to vicariously experience preteen rejection from the safety of young adulthood.
So in a prevailing sense, Damone is a safe bet as long as you know what you're looking for. It's like renting the latest romantic comedy or buying Cheap Trick's greatest hits. You know what you want, you know what you receive.
Damone is no more a risk to the consumer as it is to RCA, a smart company who knows what sells and that done and done again means simply, "Do it one more time." And to quote another source of great nostalgic merit, "Play it again Sam."
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