Bounce back time (original) (raw)

If Justine Frischmann had never dated Brett Anderson and Damon Albarn, would anyone have ever cared about her band? As they return from a five-year hiatus of inactivity and drug abuse that would have seen them cast onto a DSS Restart programme if they were in any other walk of life, it's worth pondering the question "Just what have Elastica got?" They've come back with a round of interviews with Frischmann that infuriate as much as they exonerate. Sometimes she's disarmingly frank on drugs, at other times she's deliberately obfuscatory. Sometimes she takes some of the blame for being away so long, mostly she lays it all - "breakdown", etc - on Albarn. Thus doing so, she adds to her self-mythology (those tantalising drug rumours, songs about the band, lyrics revealing an attraction to squalor) but unwittingly questions her own judgement.

Musically, things should be even more - to use an old Stranglers album title - black and white. They seemingly have barely anything other than wrinkly old punk riffs. On their first, eponymous album, most of those were stolen from Wire and the Stranglers (both bands successfully sued) and on their new, inferior opus, The Menace, little has changed. But as their thunderous return to the stage proves, Elastica are one heck of a live band.

The biggest irony is that, five years on from Britpop and 23 from Wire's Pink Flag, they sound curiously fresh. Pop is hardly brimming with artists who are experimenting with discordancy but Elastica do it so well they reach a raw power that touches nerve centres pop has patently forgotten. Expanded to a six-piece (including two keyboardists), their sound - all sea-dredging bass, architectural powerchords and sassy, spiky vocals - literally reeks of sweat, sleaze and sex. Visually, too, they're dynamite. Hair piled up and wearing a ripped vest, Frischmann looks like some sort of debauched cheerleader and drips with new found confidence. Equally, where few thought they'd recover from the loss of founder guitarist/songwriter/pin-up Donna Matthews, the addition of elfin keyboardist/vocalist Mew has proved a masterstroke. Clad in an ancient-looking Cheap Trick T-shirt, she counterbalance's Frischmann's rock queen posturing with a display of energetic, splenetic enthusiasm it's impossible not to warm to.

Musically, they perform all the old hits (Line Up, Connection, Stutter, etc) and sensibly steer clear of their most derivative material, with the exception of Human, Wire's Lowdown played extremely badly. When they avoid such doggerel, they breath new life into old rope and - hopefully - send a new generation scurrying towards their influences. Waking Up wonderfully remodels No More Heroes. But their best - the eerie, unnerving My Sex - while it pinches a title from Ultravox, doesn't sound like anybody at all. That song could refer to Albarn and while there are no stage pronouncements, his presence haunts proceedings in the form of curiously lookalike new guitarist Paul Jones and Frischmann's utterly Damon-like habit of rolling her eyes towards the ceiling. But on this evidence, they'll soon be talking about "Justine Frischmann's ex", rather than the other way round.