The Bangles
Doll Revolution (Koch)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Summer 2004

There comes a moment about halfway through “Stealing Rosemary” when it seems like the Bangles just might pull this sucker off. The second song on Doll Revolution, “Rosemary” is the type of darkly psychedelic pop that characterized the Paisley Underground scene from whence the band sprang two decades ago, and its harmonies and minor-key guitar chords would have fit snugly on the Bangles’ self-titled Faulty Products EP. The song has the tremendous good fortune to follow in the wake of the opening cover of Elvis Costello’s “Tear Off Your Own Head (It’s A Doll Revolution),” which kicks down the doors of fifteen years of dormancy as a recording unit (the lagtime between tours is closer to an even decade) by providing a better Josie & the Pussycats tune than 92% of the songs on that movie’s soundtrack . With its caustic spark and Nuggets -like drive, it sounds, in the best possible way, like the band never changed an iota from its All Over The Place-era peak.

And then it all falls apart, just as you knew and feared it would, with “Something That You Said,” which is precisely the sort of bland, mushy Adult Contemporary pop that killed the Bangles in what could have been their prime. And from that moment on, you realize that it’s going to be every song for itself, and you settle in, weary. In a strangely touching show of democracy, just about everybody in the band gets an opportunity to waste the listener’s time. The wretched “Something” lets Susannah Hoffs get hers out of the way early, and if none of the other songs are as flat-out awful, that’s cold comfort considering that “unobjectionably tolerable” wasn’t even on the radar for All Over The Place or most of Different Light. But that doesn’t stop bassist Michael Steele from chucking out “Nickel Romeo” and “Between The Two,” neither of which sound like much of anything at all, or drummer Debbie Peterson from setting up a holding pattern with “Here Right Now.” She also spearheads the redundant “Lost At Sea,” which uses All Over The Place’s masterful “Dover Beach” as a pushing-off point and wears itself out trying to swim back.

Even with filler, though, there’s a pretty good Bangles EP buried within the confines of Doll Revolution; you sort of have to work to find it, but it’s well worth the effort. Democracy, it turns out, works both ways, as everybody gets at least one chance to shine. In addition to snarling her way through “Tear Off Your Own Head,” Hoffs delivers “I Will Take Care Of You,” which uses the same riff from “Feel” that every Big Star devotee is apparently legally bound to incorporate into at least one of their songs, but the song’s soul is rooted in “Give Me Another Chance,” and I found to my astonishment that it worked like crazy on me by the fourth or fifth time I listened to the album. I’m willing to credit Debbie Peterson with the group-vocalled “Ride The Ride” (a sort of musical sequel to Different Light’s “Let It Go” that’s more successful than “Lost At Sea”), since her voice always seemed to be positioned dead center of the band’s harmonies. Steele contributes “Song For A Good Son,” as darkly pitched as “Stealing Rosemary” but jangle-free and possessed of a vocal that sounds as haunted, though for less obvious reasons, as the one from “Following” that was, along with “September Gurls,” the reason she became my favorite Bangle (I have no regrets).

As she was during the glory years, though, it’s Vicki Peterson who proves to be the band’s secret weapon. If most of the Bangles’ best-known songs were written by outsiders, Peterson’s songs were often their equal or better, which makes her bringing in “The Rain Song” and “Mixed Messages” from her stint in the Continental Drifters seem like a subtle attempt to have the best of both worlds. If the Drifters’ country-tinged originals were marginally better than the versions here, which could have been Banglified a bit more, Peterson’s old schoolchums still do a fine job, and I have documented proof that I called “Mixed Messages” as a Bangles tune in 1995.

Vicki doesn’t get a passing grade simply by resubmitting work from another class, however, as evidenced by “Single By Choice,” which loses the contest for the best track on the CD to “Tear Off Your Own Head” and must console itself with being the best song. A terrific, Amy Rigby-like number that addresses big romantic questions that most people don’t even know to ask, “Single By Choice” sounds nothing like the Bangles, with a rumbling, tremoloed drop-D guitar drone pulsing its way through. A song like this wouldn’t have even been an option for the first-go-round Bangles; the pop marketplace just wasn’t open to lyrics that so clearly flouted some of the basic assumptions of both pop songwriting and adult interaction, and the band would have sounded like idiots trying to pull it off in their 20s. By now, though, Peterson has seen enough to know exactly what she wants, and what she doesn’t want, and she states in clear and simple terms why she could never be happy following somebody else’s script as the gorgeous harmony that her bandmates sound like they’ll never lose backs her up, making it mournful but without regret and not a little triumphant. It may not be precisely the Bangles I’ve loved since that copy of All Over The Place fell into my hands in college, but for just over half of its duration, Doll Revolution presents to the world a Bangles that I’m more than happy to welcome back.

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