Menthol
- Danger:
Rock Science!
Other
Menthol/Pre-Menthol releases
Retro without a lick of irony and with all the melody that
most purveyors of the current Electroklash movement seem to
have forgotten once drove their forefathers’ genre, Menthol
deliver the goods with panache. Following the release of a
1995 album for Capitol Records and their 1993 Mud Records
debut (under the moniker Mother), this outing was nearly lost
due to you’ve-heard-it-all-before record industry dealings.
Or maybe you haven’t heard it all before. This version
of Danger: Rock Science! was re-recorded in 2002 for less
than 1% of the original cost, yet retains its predecessor’s
central processing unit.
Menthol’s singer/lyricist/guitarist Balthazar de Lay
explains the influences: “There are of course undeniable
songwriting and sonic nods to some late 70's/early 80's bands
like Devo and New Order, otherwise known as the music my mom
did aerobics to when I was in middle school! Likewise our
drummer's parents exposed him to a pretty healthy dose of
new wave as a lad, and some of our bass player's relatives
were musicians in that scene as well, having played with Nick
Lowe and Elvis Costello back in the day. So I guess you could
say this album involves us throwing our parents' music into
the context of the Menthol Loud Guitar ideology people have
already come to know through our last record. Not very rebellious
of us!” De Lay’s international upbringing comes
out as well: “There are also some uniquely French influences
of the same style that come from my time spent growing up
in Paris: Charles de Goal, Space Art, Telephone, Lio. For
my part, much of the ‘spirit’ of Danger: Rock Science!
was heavily informed by Charles de Goal's sound: kind of like
an early Gang of Four but with drum machine and keyboards,
all with a distinctive French-waiter kind of brooding aggression.
Charles de Goal wrote a song called ‘Modem’ in which
the singer gets pissed off when he loses his telephone connection
to his personal computer and he can't reconnect to the internet,
in fucking 1981! Unrecognized visionaries, these guys!”
The same can’t be said of Menthol’s last record
label who didn’t anticipate the 21st Century backward
glance to a previous generation: “The making of this
record has been almost a comedy for us: completing it once
for Capitol almost 3 years ago only to have most of the people
at that label express to us how uncomfortable they were with
the New Wave/1980's aspect of the music... fast forward to
our new millennium, and with it a rapid re-integration of
80's aesthetics into popular culture, which I think applies
as much to Britney Spears and Latin Pop Idols (Rico Suave
anyone?) as it does to so-called Electroklash from NY/Berlin.
All the while we've just been doing our thing our way in our
own little corner of the rock firmament. Until now, that is!”
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