Elastica: The Menace : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

For listeners who know their British post-punk history, Elastica are the ultimate guilty pleasure. Their 1995 debut, Elastica, still sounds like the work of cheeky plagiarists with taste so cool and tunes so smart that the group's blatant thievery from bands like Wire and the Stranglers is more than forgivable. The Menace, the long-delayed follow-up, finds Elastica in an unrepentant mood, scuffing up their terse, trashy guitar rock with fun-house noise while adding a handful of ambient mood pieces that sound like Aphex Twin castoffs. "My Sex," with its murmured vocals and church-y organ, suggests a prayer service, but this album is anything but reverent.

Elastica are still borrowing from old friends. The teeter-totter guitar riff from Wire's "Lowdown" is recycled in the ominous "Human"; Elastica's insidiously catchy "Nothing Stays the Same'' nicks the chorus from Wire's "Kidney Bingos" and blends it with echoes of the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale." Elastica faithfully cover Trio's underground-single-turned-car-commercial "Da Da Da," and the Fall's Mark E. Smith pops up on the album in a caustic cameo.

But it is Elastica leader Justine Frischmann's eat-this attitude that carries The Menace. "You're so dead in the water," the singer-guitarist snarls in "Generator," one of several sharp kicks to the sternum that make the album hurtle by in under thirty-nine minutes. Garbage-can drums, rinky-dink keyboards and corrosive guitars also make a fine mess of all those secondhand melodies. Elastica may not be particularly original, but they're boisterous enough to make that shortcoming beside the point. (RS 847)

GREG KOT