The winners of the 2002 Rock and Roll Rumble, to be decided tonight (Thursday, May 23) at the Middle East, will be the Gentlemen. They will be selected over Saturday night’s semifinal winner, Quitter, and the wild-card entry, Mr. Airplane Man (also from Saturday), for the same reasons they triumphed in both their preliminary contest (where they outlived a ballistic set by Crash and Burn) and in their semifinal (where they somehow prevailed over the Lost City Angels and the Damn Personals). Those reasons are their workmanlike professionalism and their mortifying lack of complexity.
The Rumble, which in its final round is judged by industry vets, tends to reward clichŽs. The Gentlemen are full of ’em. They’re a decent band, but every time they try to be a lewd, hard-rocking garage-punk outfit — they opened their preliminary-round set with the Dogmatics’ "Pussy Whipped" — they invariably convince you that they belong in a college bar in Poughkeepsie. Nonetheless, a panel of label hacks will likely decide (correctly) that the future of rock and roll does not reside in the hands of New Englanders playing scraggly Southern rock dressed up as Soundgarden, and Quitter will be sunk. The real crime will be that the judges won’t award the title to Mr. Airplane Man, who deserve everything we can possibly give them.
All bickering aside — and this event is nothing if not an excuse for good-natured bickering — this was the best year for the Rumble in recent memory; the inventory of bands who didn’t make it to the final could easily keep a good indie label in business for the next five years. Give, the group who grew out of ’90s hardcore faves Honkeyball, are in the running to become the first band signed to a new Elektra-distributed imprint run by new-metal superstars Staind. And the Lost City Angels are expected to sign soon with Offspring singer Dexter Holland’s Nitro label. The Angels, who’ve been touring with Social Distortion out West, come off as a cross between the Misfits and Guns N’ Roses, with the singer’s Danzig fixation masking the band’s knack for the kind of pop-punk hooks that have gotten Saves the Day on MTV. And Give’s passive-aggressive power ballads, though not my cup of tea, have shown increasing signs of marketable gloss.
The bassist from Damn Personals, who looks like Zeke frontman Marky Felchtone’s kid brother, demanded the Phoenix stop referring to his group as a "mod-pop" band. "Rock, man — we’re a rock band!" he said, flashing the devil horns. So they are, but then again, so is everyone these days. The permutations of rockingness were many, but the bandwidth was slim: it appeared Damn Personals and the Lost City Angels cancelled each other out on Friday, and the Jaded Salingers seemed just a slightly paler shade of emo, though I hope these three have the good sense to tour together soon. The only band stretching the current boundaries of blistering rock were Milligram, whose songs continue to mutate into bulkier, choppier, faster, slower, and more turgid forms of hostility. In a contest judged by Virgin Records lackeys, they didn’t have a prayer, which is precisely the point.
The Gentlemen were the least-challenging group in the semis; their triumph is the triumph of the over-obvious. Last Friday, they played a set top-heavy with tunes from their first album — amped-up Stones, watered-down Heartbreakers — while dipping into their latest album only for token hard-rockers. It was impossible to miss the Kiss references in their "Show Me How You Rock and Roll," but they weren’t taking any chances: a few songs later, they jumped on the monitors and vamped into "Detroit Rock City." ("I wasn’t a Gentlemen fan when I came here," Weekly Dig critic J. Bennett opined afterward. "And I won’t be one when I leave. But when they played Kiss, I liked them. I liked them a lot.")
Mr. Airplane Man have undergone a profound transformation since their last album, Red Lite (Sympathy for the Record Industry), and they show signs of the kind of leap made by another blues-punk duo who used to record for Sympathy. Like the White Stripes, Mr. Airplane Man are the kind of band who can kick up a mighty wall of rock with a minimum of fuss; unlike Meg White, drummer Tara McManus now kicks a ton of ass. (She’s also pulling double and triple duty on back-up vocals and keyboard.) Singer/guitarist Margaret Garrett’s new songs possess a previously undisclosed pop savvy. The best of these — I neglected to write down the title — was haunting, pretty garage-punk at its best, and it should be, since (as Garrett admitted after the show) it was written after repeated listenings to the Lyres’ "Help You Ann" and uses the same chords.
