From the distant security of London, the Detroit garage rock scene has always looked a cosy, romantic set-up. A Motor City fraternity where everyone lives with each other, plays with each other, produces each other, lends each other guitars and old blues records; a place where even hack comedians like The Electric Six can be embraced as brothers.
For many of the bands there, however, the astonishing success of The White Stripes has been a double-edged sword. Sure, Jack White's generous patronage may have launched many bands internationally, but how many can actually flourish out of his shadow? Who wants to be the second-best band in Detroit when your ambition – or at least your ego – is driving you towards bigger goals?
This, it seems, is the way things look from the perspective of Jason Stollsteimer, the amusingly bolshy leader of The Von Bondies. The Von Bondies, you may remember, have done rather well out of The White Stripes. White took them to Europe on tour, produced their first album "Lack Of Communication", let them rehearse in his attic and spent some time courting their guitarist, Marcie Bolen.
Stollsteimer, though, wants to be a planet, not a satellite. "We were never happy with the sound of our first record," he claimed recently, in one of a series of disassociating digs that led to White claiming, "Detroit is such a great family, and they're kind of a sore thumb," and the messy fracas that put Stollsteimer in hospital last December.
Hence 'Pawn Shoppe Heart' is a blatant attempt to escape Detroit before it implodes. For a start, it sounds grander, flasher, far more ostentatious than any other record from that scene, produced as it was by former Talking Head Jerry Harrison in San Francisco. The garage ramalams are glossier, the swamp blues more digestible, but the musical remit has been expanded, too. The opening 'No Regrets' is an unabashed glam stomp. Frequently, Bolen and bassist Carrie Smith add Runaways harmonies to Stollsteimer's theatrical wail. The first single, 'C'Mon, C'Mon', even risks relative contemporaneity, drawing on the Pixies more than The Animals for a change.
It's all fairly enjoyable, of course. The four Von Bondies remain terrific players, and Stollsteimer's sustained indignation is always good for a laugh. But at times, the calculated nature of it all is distracting, and you long for the harebrained rawness which made "Lack Of Communication" the best record (besides those by The White Stripes) that the Detroit revival has produced.
What's more, there's something rather self-defeating about "Pawn Shoppe Heart". If Stollsteimer had more grace – and, possibly, wit - he would try and transcend Detroit instead of setting his band in opposition to it. There's a suffocating sense of the parochial here, as he talks of a "broken land called Detroit city" on the admittedly excellent 'Broken Man' and writes a snarky song, "Been Swank", about Jack White flatmate and Soledad Brothers drummer Ben Swank. It makes "Pawn Shoppe Heart" a decent album but, by Stollsteimer's standards, a misfiring one: an album which, thanks to its efforts to the contrary, will always be irreducibly linked with the scene The Von Bondies affect to despise.
