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Sound Advice: Below The Belt by Danko Jones
Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.
It’s understandable that Danko Jones ain’t every Torontonian’s trip. In a city where only the most epoch-shatteringly avant-garde and genre-bending acts seem to garner any real street cred, the meat ‘n potatoes rock ‘n roll trio come off sounding as original as, well, the phrase “meat ‘n potatoes rock ‘n roll.” Hell, let’s face it: their latest effort bestows a hackneyed expression, Below The Belt, to eleven tracks that leave no rock cliché unturned, from sexual metaphors (“Magic Snake”) to three-chord AC/DC nods (“Like Dynamite”) to KISS-cribbing stadium-rock choruses (“Tonight Is Fine”) to widdly-widdly guitar solos (“The Sore Loser”) to gratuitous cowbell abuse (“Active Volcanoes”).
Predictable? Indubitably. Yet, somehow, these guys have attained household name status in Europe (the dudes sell out exponentially more gigs abroad than they do in the motherland). Listen to Below The Belt with your artsy-fartsy filter set to low and you’ll hear at least a few of the reasons why: snappy punch-pop riffs, speaker-shaking bass fuzz, an unrelenting 4/4 party swagger, and a comically belligerent namesake/frontman who frantically talk-sings about how he needs to fuck some girl, like, right now. Sure, that pretty much describes every album Danko’s released over the past fifteen years, but a band can still build a reputable career off of writing the same record over and over again—just ask Lemmy Kilmister (who, incidentally, appears in the trio’s new video).
Of course, that’s not to say the Mango Kid doesn’t display any traces of evolution here. This time, he’s widened his literary palette, writing not only about women he’d like to bed, but also women he’d like to kick to the curb (“I Wanna Break Up With You”), receive teary-eyed forgiveness pleas from (“Apology Accepted”), and harshly ridicule for aging ungracefully (“The Sore Loser”). Abandoning the over-polished production of 2008’s Never Too Loud, Below The Belt fuses that album’s forays into melody, harmony, and extended bridges with a gritty, up-yer-arse aesthetic more akin to ’02’s Born A Lion. The by-product is a high-octane, impressively arranged, and dangerously infectious record that sees the band at arguably its tightest—check out the almost Queens Of The Stone Age-ish syncopations during the verses to “I Think Bad Thoughts” or the tastefully-timed key changes towards the end of “Magic Snake.”
But, meh, screw the petty details. Bottom line is it’s the same ol’ hits-the-spot-each-time Danko: dumb, disposable, and more fun than a barrel of monkeys.