keeper of the flame for jangle rock
by Vox Populi
On "Push Me Pull You" what you have in a nut shell is Patti Smith singing REM. If you like Smith's full-throated, emotionally naked vocals and REM's Mitch Easter/Don Dixon produced jangle guitar music from the 80's you will like this CD. The track "Walk" sounds musically similar to "Maps and Legends" and other songs from "Fables of the Reconstruction".
The vocals on the CD are strong and distinctive in the same way that Patti Smith's are. Check out Firmament and the resemblence between the two vocalists is striking. The similarity between band names "Alice Despard Group" and "Patti Smith Group" helps to beg such comparisons. Of course there are similarities with other bands as well. The track "She's Making Faces" sounds similar to material from Let's Active (Mitch Easter's band). The deliberate pace of the over-amped rhythm guitar (producing the trade-mark twang of jangle rock) accompanied by the cymbol-bash from the drums and arresting vocals from Despard are in keeping with Easter's band. Another band whose sound reverberates on this disc is the Swimming Pool Q's. The track "November Day" sounds very like the Q's combination of folkish rhythm guitars with some electric lead guitar work and female lead vocals.
As much as Despard's music resembles the bands mentioned above it would be a mistake to think of her music as simply derivitive of them. If the music of "Push Me..." calls to mind these other artists it has more to do with the time period that Despard began playing around DC than with an attempt to recreate the sound. Despard sounds like Let's Active and Swimming Pool Q's because she was a contemporary of those bands but, unlike the other bands, she managed to survive and is now being heard by a wider audience.
Despard has preserved the best of a time period's pop music and has managed to update it with a current sensibility.
