vandalias

    The Vandalias drifted into my eager young hands in 1993 in the form of a vinyl 45. The friend who gave it to me hated the bouncy optimism of "Build This House", but I must have spun that single a hundred times that first week. The song quickly wormed its way onto my alltime favourite songs list.

     It was almost two years before I heard another Vandalias song. In 1995 they released their Mach V CD, and when I heard it I immediately fell in love with the three boys from Minneapolis. It was one of those rare pop albums that I could listen to from top to bottom, over and over, day in and day out (a quality shared only with the Buzzcocks' Singles Going Steady and the Jam's Setting Sons). And their 1998 CD, Buzzbomb!, clinched it: these guys had the kind of songwriting talent and rock swagger to put them right up there with the 'Cocks, Small Faces and Sweet.

     But it wasn't until three months after I bought Buzzbomb! began to fully understand how the Vandalias achieved such Olympian heights. It started with an accident: I was dusting my CD rack (longtime penpals will no doubt recall that I'm as obsessive about tidiness as I am about rock and roll) when, to my horror, I tipped Buzzbomb! off the rack, sending it crashing to the concrete floor. The case flew apart; the CD tray popped out, sending the disc itself rolling across the dining room and under my drawing table...
    But shame on me! I almost gave away a secret. And the secret holds the key to the Vandalias' charm.

    Without giving away too much, suffice it to say that the Vandalias have refined the pop-rock experience to the point of perfection. No other band has ever realised such conceptual purity; no other band has ever dared to step across the line into absolute Platonic pop absolutism, or tapped the main line of Jungian archetypal electromedia lovepower.

    Lots of musicians have approached the line: witness the the subsuming of personality in KISS, or Michael Jackson's biosculpture horrors, or the Banana Splits' hallucinogenic candycoated razzledazzle. The mighty struggle that was Sweet came closest to stepping over. But it was the Vandalias who dared throw their flesh'n'blood bodies down the rabbit hole, tempt the terrors of the chocolate factory.

     And now (11 September 2000) I hear they've signed with NBC to star in a Saturday Morning cartoon! Only the high whine of the tiny tube could enhance their pop lustre.