Spend The Night is a paltry excuse for a Rock album. Repetitive, clichéd, uninspired. This is
Jet done poorly.
So that was an overtly opinionated and harsh introduction. And rightly so. At times and in small doses
The Donnas are bearable, but 40 minutes is truly horrendous. It's not that the sound is overwhelmingly poor, it's the mind-numbing repetitiveness. If ever I heard an album that sounded the same from start to finish, surely it's
Spend The Night. Insipidity seems like an apt description. The watered-down
AC/DC-Rock sound that producers Jason Carmer and Robert Shimp have tried to create wears thin as soon as the novelty of an all-girl Rock band wears off (which happens
quickly). Underpinning the unpleasantness is the remarkably poor lyrics and pedestrian musicianship. Songs about drinking and trying to pick up often get old quickly, and just because they're sung by a girl makes no difference. This seems to be a concept
The Donnas don't ever grasp.
Spend The Night's major weakness is it's lack of variety. There is absolutely none. Every song is a half-baked, melodious Pop-Rock song. Beefy power-chord riffs are the backbone of this album and
The Donnas' sound in general. Much like standard
AC/DC riffs, just with no balls and a lot less rockin'. This is female Acca-Dacca aimed at teenage girls (rather than twenty-something men).
The Donnas seem to be somewhere between
Avril and
Jet. Perhaps not the best Rock sandwich. Nonetheless it is not the sound that drags this album so far down, it is the lack of substance. The guitar solos sound as if they were written during a smoke break at recording, the drumming is incessantly standard and the bass offers up absolutely nothing. The lyrical content is dire at best with the ubiquitous reliance on the oestrogen-fuelled attitude all-girl Rock groups are synonymous with providing little more than songs about boys and binges. The backing vocals (particularly the 'gang-style' backing) are exceptionally horrible. As infuriating as anything about this record is the band members' use of ridiculous monikers, adding the first letter of their last names to "Donna". Thus the lead singer was credited as "Donna A". How daft. Well I guess most females with a first name of "Brett" would prefer a nickname, but still.
There are some moments that really make me question giving up 37 megabytes of my monthly download limit to get these thirteen songs, one of which has to be the unbelievably repulsive break in
Pass It Around. Overall the song is not an abysmal effort, but the 15 seconds where the girls thought it would be a good idea to shout, unaccompanied, “Pass that glass, Pass it around” takes the album to new lows, reminding listeners of their little sister's third-grade musical. However the record is saved from spiralling out of control after that abomination by the surprisingly reasonable
Too Bad About Your Girl. Although the chorus could easily be interchanged with any number of songs on the album, the reserved verse shows that (
"Donna A") Anderson's voice can be at times well suited to the music and certainly engaging. There is undeniably some potential within several of the songs, provided you can look past the cheap lyrics and lack of meaning. The strong lead-guitar in
I Don't Care (So There) is solid and comes to the fore during the solo and ending, even if it is completely overshadowed by the rebellious 12-year-old-girl chorus.
Habitually with Pop albums - and certainly with albums from all-girl groups - a promising lead-single is often a (the) stand-out.
Take It Off was the 'hit' single from
Spend The Night but it offers little salvation. It is transposable with the other twelve tracks and is remarkably unremarkable. The lyrics are outstandingly brash with Anderson demanding that her partner “Take it off… Because I get what I want and I like what I see… Just do it, You don't have to ask”. Yet this only stands as a precursor to the penultimate track “
Take Me To The Backseat”, the title speaking for itself.
The Donnas revel in singing about being sluts throughout
Spend The Night:
“I don't want to hear you talking,
I don't want to play your games,
Let's get this baby rockin',
Just take me to the backseat.”
Of course this is not to say that songs about sex can't and don't work, rather that
The Donnas do it to death, while managing at the same time to be overly crass. And I'm certainly not taking a chauvinistic stance to this either, it's a genuine flaw of the album.
Get three girls to play guitars and get another to play drums and it will sell, right? Yeah, and this did. It wasn't an international smash but it did reach #62 on the Billboard charts. That just goes to show that the novelty factor of an all-girl Rock band can far outweigh the value of their music. Although
It's On The Rocks augurs well for at least a respectable offering, the truth of it is that
Spend The Night is the most repetitive, bland and unimaginative record I have listened to in quite a while. Perhaps there's something I am just missing about this but one song is more than enough per sitting of this Californian four-piece. If you really wanted to have
one song to listen to then perhaps
It's On The Rocks,
Take It Off or
Too Bad About Your Girl would be ok, but I certainly wouldn't recommend the entire album. There are occasional moments of decent 'Rock' but for sheer monotony I can't give this any more than one-and-a-half out of five.
