E-Mail This Article to a Friend Identity crisis The Datsuns and the garage revival BY BRETT MILANO

The recent spate of high-profile garage-rock releases represents major-label business pretty much as usual. Once the more-or-less garagy White Stripes became last year’s left-field success story, the search got under way for the next in line. The Hives, who had a similar underground buzz and some of the same reference points, seemed as good a choice as any. So major-label deals went not only to the Hives but to the Hives’ opening band, the Mooney Suzuki, and to the Hives’ singer’s girlfriend’s band, Sahara Hotnights.

One of the Hives’ accomplishments was to steal the Datsuns’ thunder. The New Zealand quartet signed a major-label deal in 2002, before the Hives did, and for a while they looked to be the next big garage thing. Indeed, if you were at the White Stripes/Datsuns/Brendan Benson bill at the Roxy two years ago, you know that the Datsuns’ "Motherfucker from Hell" was the song you were most likely to walk out singing. The Datsuns proved to be less cartoonish than the Hives, or at least cartoonish in a more familiar way: singer Dolf De Datsun did the manic Iggy thing just right, and the band had the Stooges/MC5 adrenaline blur down pat. Yet nothing else in that set — or on their homonymous debut disc (V2) — enabled observers to tell whether the Datsuns had enough songs to stand out from the crowd or would merely be a one-hit wonder on some future "Monsters of Garage" compilation.

The sophomore album, Outta Sight/Outta Mind (V2), answers in the band’s favor, but it also brings up the age-old question of how punk and garage need to get recorded. It barely mattered that the most significant of early punk and garage records sounded like crap: sometimes all it took was one mike anywhere near the studio to imbibe the magic essence. For evidence, try any of the Sonics’ early tracks, or the countless one-shot wonders on the Pebbles and Back from the Grave series — or for that matter, the first Ramones album, which pulled the Beatles trick of putting half the instruments on one channel and half on the other. The Sonics’ catalogue was the worst-recorded of the lot — glossy studios didn’t come easy in mid-’60s Seattle — but that didn’t keep primal blasts like "Strychnine" and "Psycho" from deserving and getting a million cover versions. As it happens, the Sonics’ catalogue has just been remastered from original tapes for the first time, on the import collection Psycho-Sonic (Big Beat). And the remastering sounds great, making the rhythm section audible for the first time on some tracks — but those songs were already life changers before they got sharpened up.

Modern garage is now going through the same identity crisis that ‘70s punk did when the major labels got hold of it and brought non-punk producers in to handle the bands. Sometimes the unlikely match-ups worked great: Todd Rundgren was enough of a maverick to corral the New York Dolls; and a few albums with Procol Harum somehow prepared producer Chris Thomas to take on the Sex Pistols. But then there were the unfortunate likes of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason and Cream producer/Mountain member Felix Pappalardi, who respectively made messes of the Damned’s and the Dead Boys’ sophomore efforts. Or popmeisters Flo & Eddie, who kept Boston’s DMZ from making the great album they had in them.

Advance word has it that the Mooney Suzuki’s forthcoming Alive & Amplified, produced by bubblegum figures the Matrix, might join the list of legendary trainwrecks. Yet the Datsuns’ choice of producer for Outta Sight is almost as odd: John Paul Jones. Yes, Jones seems to have played on half the pop singles that came out of London studios in the mid ‘60s, and he’s lately revealed an adventurous streak by producing the Butthole Surfers and collaborating with Diamanda Galás. But he’s still a former member of Led Zeppelin, who did as much as anybody to drive the beautiful simplicity of garage rock off the planet.

For most of Outta Sight/Outta Mind, both band and producer keep their heads in the pre-Zeppelin era. Boasting nothing remotely as rude as "Motherfucker from Hell," the album harks back to the days when the freaky ‘60s bands learned how to write hit singles. The best tracks even allude to songs from that era: "That Sure Ain’t Right" is Them’s "Gloria" with different lyrics; "Don’t Come Knocking" is the Guess Who’s "American Woman" with different music. A Jimmy Page–style riff sneaks into "Lucille," but the band pummel it less gracefully than Zeppelin would have. (Yes, that’s a compliment.) The Zeppelin influence is felt only in the finale, "I Got No Words," an arena-grandiose epic whose main riff isn’t far from "Moby Dick."

By toning down the blur and focusing on the songs, Jones and the Datsuns have made a disc that’s more ambitious, if less fun, than a strict garage throwback — in other words, they’ve made a modern Hoodoo Gurus album. But the disc winds up speaking well for the garage revival: you can always tell a trend is working when its B-level bands are this good.