One of those bands that always prompts one of the more unattractive qualities of human beings, "bragging". ...but it's not so much the spouting off of information which is of relevance to a narrow margin of society that is really intended, more so: it's really great to see people succeed with their art.
That being said, The 5.6.7.8's (an all girl Japanese garage band who have been active since the early nineties) have been far within the parameters of my peripheral vision for as long as I can remember. From an early age, I obsessed on most things on Crypt, Estrus and Sympathy for the Record Industry, and related (Teengenerate, The Rip-Offs, New Bomb Turks, The Mummies, etc). Mid-90's, early teens in central New Jersey, this was not at all the ideal music for me to want to see. There were plenty of places to catch punk and hardcore shows, but virtually 100% of the garage sort, took place at bars.
Nonetheless, seeing them in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill 10 years later, and then hearing their cover of the 50's song "Woo Hoo" in countless commercials and even sung by the developmentally disabled individuals at the workshop that I supervise, it's somewhat exhilarating on on small level. That song was on a 10" that Sympathy put out in like 1996!
An even more surprising burst into mainstream media was The White Stripe's zero-to-sixty maneuver in the early 2000's. Some singles and a couple LPs on Sympathy, and then all of a sudden "Seven Nation Army" was all over the radio and they were getting a Grammy for it.
In recent years, Jack White has been busy releasing a surprisingly diverse and left-field series of records on his label, Third Man. The style and aesthetics are smart, to say the least. Simple photo of an artist or band in front of a blue back ground as the cover for countless singles, it makes anyone male or female, young or old, strangely attractive and enticing. It helps that they're all good in their own right too, but the man absolutely knows what he is doing.
The flip side of this is the stripped down, no frills approach of a new batch of live LPs (an on-going project with recordings from shows outside Jack's space in Nashville, including Tyvek, No Bunny, Davilia 666 and a handful more so far and upcoming). I didn't even know that there was a 5.6.7.8's one on deck, so this was a nice surprise.
Something about the lack of sensationalism is really appealing. Simple plain black die-cut jacket so you can only see what it even is by reading the center label, and a recording that is veering more towards realistic and raw than not. This works well for the 5.6.7.8's, because it allows their energy to come through rather than having it lost somewhere in the process. If this were any more sterile, it would be bad.
Instead, it's just about as perfect as it could be. Yes, they are just slightly off at times, the mix is not always perfect, there may even be a short spurt of feedback here and there. Perhaps a small point of concern to some, this somehow seems to legitimize it more for me, and really just adds to the feeling that these girls were having a blast and just going with it (like I assume they would any time that they play).
To be fair, I could do with out the lounge-like closer of the A-side, "Three Cool Chicks", but that's just because it, and the country/twang-friendly "Charumera Sobaya" which opens the flip, are a break in the flow of the rest of the record. In all actuality, "Three Cool Chicks" would be at home on one of the three Serge Mendes & Brasil 66 LPs that I listened to mid-afternoon, yesterday, but that's neither here nor there.
Besides, it's hard to complain about song selection when there are so many old ones on here, pleasantly surprising me to say the least: "Bomb The Twist", "The Barracuda", "I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield", for etc - these have been listened to so many times before that they feel more like standards than anything else, and a new perspective, an excellent live document which is dished out through the feeding tube of someone else who has enjoyed the rare situation of success without compromise, is very much welcome.
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