She Wants Revenge have a strange sound. It’s familiar, but different. It’s retro but somehow very
now. The shorthand way to describe them would be to admit that, well, they sound like New Order. Or maybe like Interpol, though that’s a little pointless when Interpol just sound like New Order too. It’s kinder to imagine that there
was no new-wave electro goth movement in 1980s England and try to describe She Wants Revenge afresh. They play dark pop songs, with beats and basslines that practically weld your hips to the dancefloor. It’s a combination of traditional rock song structures with electronically precise perfomance.
It’s deceptively simple music. Repetitive bass, monotone, almost spoken lyrics. Let it get under your skin though and you can find a lot more in there. Those beats are anything but simplistic. Those basslines are hypnotic. Those lyrics … well, that’s where She Wants Revenge can
really hook you. The songs are all about boy/girl relationships, but not on the usual level. These lyrics concern themselves with details. The subject matter may be the usual gothy teen angst, but it’s conveyed by engulfing you in the moment. The way the girl across the dancefloor flicks her hair. The way the lights swing around the ceiling and across the floor as you get up the courage to talk to her. The nervous glance before speaking. Like I said,
details. Like a good pulp novel, the lyrics paint a vivid picture of moments in someone else’s world.
She Wants Revenge’s self-titled debut album has a cinematic quality. There’s no overarching storyline, but each song plays like a short film. You’re dropped into a situation, a feeling, a relationship of sorts. If you’re sucked in, you find yourself tapping your foot, nodding your head, and by the chorus you’re dancing along.
Red Flags & Long Nights comes on like a road movie, the drive to a secret, special nightclub.
These Things channels Depeche Mode more than any other track,
I Don’t Wanna Fall in Love ups the tempo: fast, driving, hard and running headlong into an sudden crashing stop.
Out of Control is the centrepiece of the record, as near to a statement of intent as She Wants Revenge get. An echoing guitar stab builds to a synth-led chorus as you follow the blow-by-blow story of hooking up with a girl in a dance club. This is the essence of their sound. They want to make girls dance, fall in love and, just sometimes, cry.
Sister and
Tear You Apart are the highlights of the second half, both covering similar territory of submissive/dominant roles in fresh new relationships. The video for
Tear You Apart is an outstanding thing, directed by Joaquin Phoenix. Taking a single line from the chorus and basing the whole video around that, it’s a masterpiece of post-X-files high-school noir. Horror and science-fiction paranoia as a metaphor for teen angst is not a new idea, but it has rarely been handled so successfully in under five minutes.
She Wants Revenge are a two-man band. Californians Justin Warfield and Adam 12. Filled out by two friends for live shows, the songwriting, recording and production is all the work of Justin and Adam. Justin Warfield’s name may well be familiar. Starting out as a celebrated rapper in the early nineties, his first album
Field Trip to Planet Nine was produced by Prince Paul and established him as a favourite in the skate music scene. From there, Justin confounded expectations by forming a psychedelic rock band and putting out an album as The Justin Warfield Experience. That was followed by moving to London and setting up a two-man act called One Inch Punch, fusing Sonic Youth fuzz with lo-fi electronic beats. One Inch Punch are best known for their contribution to the
Romeo & Juliet soundtrack,
Pretty Piece of Flesh. Moving back to LA, Justin fronted a similar but more polished and harder-hitting act called Tape. Along the way there were high-profile collaborations with the likes of Bomb the Bass, Placebo and The Chemical Brothers. I already knew all this history, but knew nothing about the other half of She Wants Revenge, Adam 12. So I asked him how he and Justin hooked up.
Adam: “We’ve known each other since we were kids, but have only worked together for the past three years. I started out producing hip hop, DJing parties … I really feel that I’ve been evolving as a producer and as a musician until the point where I feel comfortable to be in a band, to work alongside another person. I’ve never wanted to be part of a band until now.”
Here in Glasgow you’re not a duo, you’re a four-piece band. Who are the other guys?
Adam: “Our guitarist, Tom, was in Tape. Scott, who plays drums, is in a band called Mellowdrone. Having collaborators in the touring band is the only natural way we can imagine doing this.” Justin: “You can tell when there’s just a backing band of hired hands. We made a record that we are really proud of. When it comes to playing live, we wanted people with us who could bring something to the table, contribute to the songs.”
She Wants Revenge don’t seem to have been thrust into the spotlight at all, they just seem to have appeared there of their own volition. The album is incredibly polished, some would say too perfect, too clinical. The Stateside success feels kind of inevitable, like it’s exactly what this band were built for. Was there a lot of hype in the States?
Justin: “There has been no deliberate hype, little press, no video airplay. We’ve built up a following by playing a lot of shows; just putting our music out there. There were hold-ups with the label, getting our album out. By the time the album came out, our songs were already on the radio. We had a top-ten single without any radio airplay, MTV exposure, or press coverage. We’ve built a following up from MySpace and word-of-mouth. 200 people come to your show, next time you play that town they bring 200 friends, and on it goes. The old-fashioned way. We did not expect the level of success we’ve had in the States. We are a lot more well-known than we thought we would be.”
She Wants Revenge have a very definite sound. It’s very clearly defined, it’s a thorough aesthetic. The UK press are picking on it as being very much a retro thing, a throwback to ’80s new wave goth.
Justin: “We love Depeche Mode and New Order, but our sound is just what came out when we wrote music together. We didn’t and don’t consciously want it to sound ‘like’ another band. Our songs are the way they are naturally. In truth, I don’t think that we do sound like any other band.” Adam: “We don’t sit down to write ‘a song like this’; we start with a beat and work from there. The beat sets the tone for the whole song.” Justin: “There are so many bands out there now, indie bands who have brought in a keyboard player, added dance beats to their songs … but you can tell. You can hear it a mile away. They don’t understand dance music, they don’t understand the beats. It’s affected. Every song I’ve ever written has started with a beat. It’s where we both come from, hip hop backgrounds, and it’s the only way we know to work. The beat is so important.”
It’s a Tuesday night in Glasgow and King Tut’s is less than half-full. They may be chart-toppers in the States, but here in the UK She Wants Revenge are just starting out. If things go the same way they have across the pond, this will be one of those gigs everybody tells you they were at, even though they weren’t.
Taking the stage to the long, droning intro of
Red Flags & Long Nights, it’s clear that She Wants Revenge are not the static electro goth types you might expect. What we have here is a living, breathing rock beast. Those precision beats from the album are pounded out with punk intensity by Thomas Frogatt, Adam 12 mans the bass and Justin, well … he’s a true rock star with a low-slung guitar and as much feedback as he can muster.
The set rattles on through potential hit after potential hit. Six songs in a row are contenders for ‘best of the night’ status, and the far-from capacity crowd are tapping feet, nodding heads, shimmying and swaying. Even the boys at the back are starting to spill their pints.
The worry is that She Wants Revenge may have blown all their stunning songs at once. That they may not have enough killer tracks to keep this up.
She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not slows the tempo and builds inexorably to a full-on goth-out crescendo … but then nothing. The band leave Adam 12 alone on the stage with his keyboard, playing through the intermission track from their album,
Disconnect. Beautiful though it may be on record, with echoes of Vangelis’
Blade Runner soundtrack, it kills the atmosphere stone dead here in King Tut’s. People stop dancing, start talking and head to the bar.
The problem with musical focus, with precise aim and intensity, is that breaking the spell can be fatal. It’s not easy to recover. The rest of She Wants Revenge return to the stage one by one as they build a cover of Depeche Mode’s
Stripped from guitar and vocals up to a full-band freak-out. It’s good, and the ’Mode fans in the audience lap it up, but it’s not quite enough.
She Wants Revenge have an ace up their sleeve though. US chart hit
Tear You Apart is the best thing they’ve done. It’s a distillation of their sound. And it has a big, loud ‘fuck’ in the chorus. It can’t fail. It doesn’t. By the first chorus, the floor in Tut’s is bouncing and by the final one the walls reverberate to a shouted “I want to
fucking tear you apart!” from the whole audience.
She Wants Revenge have made a great record of intelligent dancefloor-orientated dark pop songs, but it comes across a little too affected, a little too calculated for many people. Live, they’re a much more organic and invigorating proposition. Proper rock stars, but with beats to kill for.
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