Leave it to the experts, they know best: A review of the Damnwells' No On Listens to the Band Anymore

If you're a fan of the Damnwells, then you can most likely appreciate their disdain for the recording industry (I won't rehash the whole thing here, but check out our interview with the band's singer/songwriter Alex Dezen for more some background info). And you probably know that since giving a well-deserved middle finger to said industry and subsequently assuming control of all aspects of their career—they gave their previous album One Last Century away for free on their website—that the quality of their music has skyrocketed.

This time around, the Brooklyn-based rock outfit, which at this point is mostly just Dezen himself, has turned to Pledge Music, a UK organization that finances music projects through fan donations. The result is unequivocally the best fucking collection of songs of the band's career, and perhaps the best album so far of 2011.

NOLTTBA takes a bit of a step away from the band's customary alt-country sound, inching closer to a more mainstream aesthetic. There's a (very) slight plasticky cleanliness to the songs that could signal one of two things to the listener: that the band has gone soft, or more likely, that Dezen, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has become much more comfortable with himself as a songwriter.

Take, for instance, a song like "The Great Unknown," which at first sounds like every this-is-gonna-get-me-laid anthem written by every liberal arts college freshman but then actually reveals itself as a kind of smirking parody of those very same kinds of tunes: "So I will drive you home/ though we're both drunk and stoned/ just follow the stars and speeding red cars/ into the great unknown." Leave it to the author(s) of "Assholes" to craft a genuinely moving ballad about drunk driving.

Then you've got ultra-catchy numbers numbers like "She Goes Around," which flirts playfully with a sort of new wave groove and which more effectively demonstrates the band's ability to merge muddy boots rock with the kind of hook-heavy pop that would make the fellows in Cheap Trick proud.

[image error]Dezen has always been a good lyricist, but on NOLTTBA he takes it a step further, packing the songs so full of rich imagery that at times the lyrics literally spill out over the rhythm, as in "Let's Be Civilized": "There's a groom and a bride in my mind/ sending postcards of memories/ There's a wicked witch/ suicide cigarettes and climbing trees." Dezen has a wonderful Dylanesque ability to cull together all these quirky, disparate images into an elegant whole that, even in their most sarcastic moments, speak with more honesty than most traditional love songs.

The Damnwells is one of those bands you probably won't ever see on MTV or the Grammys or the Superbowl Halftime Show. But you will hear about them, just not through the conventional channels. Because they're not a conventional band. Music culture in America has dictated that signing with a major label and touring your brains out in a big bus and plowing Kardashian sisters is the end-all-be-all of rock stardom. The Damnwells, however, are one of a growing roster of bands to reject this ideal and to find out that they are actually better off for it.