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There’s the blues, and then there’s the blooooze. Jon Spencer plays the blooooze. Jack White plays the blooze, albeit with a coupla less o’s. The 22-20s, however, merely play the blues, and that’s largely the problem with their eponymously titled debut album.
Y’see, the blues has been dead for years now, pretty much since Eric Clapton got his hand’s on it. It’s become a moribund genre, a self-celebratory circle of spectacular musicians making spectacles of themselves. Only wired, filth-spattered proponents of the blooooze like Spencer have managed to breathe life into otherwise coffee table-bound music. And yet it’s clear that The 22-20s would like to play the blooooze.
Occasionally on this record you get a sense of the fire in their bellies. The lead single “22 Days” is one such moment, a frenzied bloodstain of a song that would sit comfortably on White Blood Cells. And the addition of Charly Coombes’s garage-punk keyboards gives 'Devil in Me' and 'Why Don’t You Do It For Me?' an authentic Nuggets-y edge. But for most of the album they sound way too polite, too in awe of heroes like Skip James and Buddy Guy, too respectful of the blues history they pay tribute to.
Unlike Jack White, The 22-20s have failed to understand that blues is a contiuum, a music whose overriding influence is traceable in almost every modern form. White’s genius has been to recognise and make apparent the connections between (and this is just four picked at random) Son House, ? and the Mysterians, Led Zeppelin, and Cole Porter and incorporate all these different takes on the blues into his own vision. Listening to The White Stripes is like reading a mighty tome on the history of American folk music; The 22-20s are the Reader’s Digest version.
