GIVE IN AND CREEP OUT WITH…- The Detectors (No Fun Records)
TURN ME ON – The Defectors (Bad Afro)
If Eddie Munster made it into his teenage years and formed a band in Herman’s garage, they’d sound a lot like this.
These are slightly different versions of the same album by this Dutch garage quintet. “Give In” is on Ann Arbor’s happening little label No Fun and “Turn Me On” comes to you courtesy of their home country’s enduring Bad Afro imprint.
“Turn Me On” landed in 2004 and to be brutally honest, left me flat. There was the odd bit of sequencer mixing it with the usual elements – and there’s the rub. I couldn’t make it past “Sleepwalking", the shambling but ultimately raucous freak-out at the midpoint of “Turn Me On”, without condemning its garage-dub, electro-noises as the thinly-veiled manifestations of opiated house music posers in acid punk clothing. What 
a dolt.
Two years later and the US edition landed in the mailbox. It only then that the penny dropped. It and its European cousin are as good as anything else around in the crowded garage genre - and way better than most. Bear with me, I'll explain why...
There’s a certain place in the garage where all the right elements come together. If a band wears some borrowed clothing when it steps outside onto a stage, that's fine, but if they mean to rise above the ranks of imitators, they need to tart up the outfit and sashay to their own beat. Which is what The Defectors do. So roll out the red carpet.
This is Album Number Three for The Defectors and they have the essential bedrock in place – a lean and mean engine room that swings in all the right places, fuzz guitar and an appropriately snot-encrusted, demented delivery from vocalist Mort Harder. But it’s Martin Bee’s all-pervading but somehow understated organ playing that’s at the epicentre of this drunken, horror-themed frat party.
Some party: "Fuck You Cause You're Lookin' Good" is stripped-back Cramps-a-rama that invokes sex (as you might guess) and also bumps and grinds in the right places. "The Final Thrill" is a scene from a sinister Spaghetti Western and is cooler than a can of Tecate in a Mexican bar in 110 degree heat. "The Zoom-Out" marries a repetitive breaks-style organ line to incessant fuzz guitar figures (veering close to what they used to term "dancefloor cross-over hit") but its pedigree is more Munsters than Moroder. Those golden organ tones win a cigar on "Dancing Ghouls", where the plastic but fun pop of the B-52s meets The Damned. "Give In..." and "Turn Me On" both feature the swinging "Pretty Baby" as well as a bona fide pop winner in "It's Gonna Take Some Time", which really is a Richard and the Young Lions song in Dutch clogs.
The difference between both albums is two songs but buy either without fear. The fact that The Defectors now have a label in the US as well as Europe (and Off the Hip are distributing Bad Afro in Australia) means you don't have an excuse not to chase down either (or both). - The Barman
1/4