LOUIS XIV
Illegal Tender
Pineapple Recording Group
· The fine line between living in the past and living in the now.
We won’t dwell on nostalgia, which is rampant and overly discussed, except to distinguish between revisionism and revivalism. The former amounts to esthetic science-fiction – what-ifs for people in the know. What if Keith Richard and Ike Turner signed to Sub Pop? What if Phil Spector produced White Light White Heat? These propositions have made Greg Dulli of The Afghan Whigs and Jason Pierce of Spiritualized notorious, but hardly wealthy. But revivalism skips the hazards of permutation and appeals first to our hearts (I loved Duran Duran! Now I love The Killers!) and then to our vanity, by way of reminding us how good our taste is (I loved XTC! Now I love the Futureheads!).
Glam rock revives particularly well – the rules are easy, the canon agreed on, and the inherent theatricality and camp at its core ensure it has none of the sacredness that make delta blues or 12-tone modernist revivals so hazardous. Louis XIV know the canon and exactly what you love about it – the faux-blues swagger of T-Rex’s The Slider, the drag show machismo of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life, the posed vulnerabilty of Lou Reed’s Transformer.
The four songs on Illegal Tender tour us through a Tony Visconti playground that hits all the right poses with just enough ambition to make it believable. "Finding Out True Love Is Blind" piles machismo and pleather-sleaze over a proto-punk riff that’s just patient enough to work. The title cut preens so much you’d think it was a Suede song (although no one who watched Sex in the City will make it through the "It takes a love-ah" chorus with a straight face). When they hit us with the necessary piano ballad, the Soft Bulletin-style production even makes it sound current. On repeated listens, I forgave them for the violins in the "Louis Reprise," which at first just reminded me that Jane’s Addiction was ambitious too.
The danger, however, is so inherent in any revival that it’s proverbial. Once finished reviewing Illegal Tender, am I likely to listen to it, or The Slider? Revisionists occasionally succeed (see The Whig’s Gentlemen and Spiritualized’s Let It All Come Down), but unless a good revival is within walking distance on a Saturday night (I love the English Teeth), I’ll probably just stick with T-Rex.
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