Beautiful New Born Children - Do The Do

(Domino, 2005)

I feel guilty and dopey comparing a garage rawk single to both the White Stripes and the Strokes, but sit back now and watch as I do it anyway. Here we’ve got two short bursts of fast, trebly, guitar-based rock ’n’ roll with bash-bash-bash drumming; very American! Seeks simple transcendence through anyone-can-do-it boneheadedness – though no hints of rock brutality, unfortunately – and the lead vox wail away atop everything with a definite Jack White-style nasal twang. Golly, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in those misty memories of the class of ’01, especially as the over-saturated vocals also seem to employ the same recording technique used on the early Strokes records. And such comparisons only hurt Beautiful New Born Children, cuz their elders, though their faults were many, simply wrote better songs than these (Granted: B-side “Paper Mill” does have a jaunty, choppy rhythm that is itself rather Strokesian and rather pleasant). This single’s not quite a dud, but really, you’ve heard it all before, and none of this is catchy enough or wild enough (no wacky coconuts, no wacky loco-nuts here) to make any of it matter. For fetishists only.