The Donnas - Gold Medal
(Atlantic)
Did I miss the memo? When did The Donnas change their name to The Avrils? Whether this mess is attributable to corporate pressure to come up with a “hit” album is debateable, but saddling the saviours of female punk rock with Ms. Levigne’s current producer/opening act, Butch Walker (the former Marvelous 3 frontman who’s currently whining his way through a lackluster solo career full of sub-Matthew Sweet treacle on little known albums like Left of Self-Centered and Letters) and turning Brett (“Donna A”) Anderson into that Canadian slackette (particularly on “Is That All You’ve Got For Me”) almost had me ripping the disk out of the player and frisbeeing it across the room. It’s simply a blatant act of flipping the middle finger to Donnaholics everywhere.
Just as teenie poppers Good Charlotte commited career suicide with their recent attempt at “growth” in the form of that silly concept album The Chronicles of Life and Death (ho-hum, yawn!) which did little more than drive their fans back into Billie Joe Green Day’s arms in one of this year’s biggest and silliest rock showdowns: the battle of the punk concept albums, The Avrils, er, The Donnas’ feeble attempts to fix what ain’t broken on their seventh album together (including their eighth-grade skronkfest as The Electrocutes, Steal Yer Lunch Money) finds them jettisoning their steady diet of high energy, Runaways/Girlschool-inspired punkette anthems in favor of bland, slick, overproduced snorers (save the safe, cotton candy, sugar sweet, watered down arrangements for your swooning solo material, Mr. Walker).
A clue that the girls may be unwitting pawns in their label’s pitiful attempt to move product can be found in a lyric from the lead single, “Fall Behind Me”—“How long does she have to dumb it down?” There, in a nutshell, is the problem with this record. Since the whole concept of The Donnas is good, clean, dumb fun, bragging about it is sledgehammer marketing of the worst kind, even if it is accurate: Gold Medal is nothing less than the “dumbing down” of the Donnas. After ten years, even the coy euphemisms of “Revolover” (“Half cocked and fully loaded” and “You’re deeper than you’ve ever been before”) have crossed the line from silly-but-cute to terminally stupid. It’s too bad they don’t have the clout to take a hint from George Costanza and spit right back, “I’m not gonna dumb it down for some bonehead mass audience!” (from the Seinfeld episode, “The Comeback”)
A slick glossy sheen is evident immediately on opener, “I Don’t Want To Know,” which buries its fist-pumping anthemic riffing under a barrage of hairspray and glitzy makeup. The unnecessary, extended bass solo tacked on to the end of “Don’t Break Me Down” is an embarrassing exercise in album filler that does nothing but showcase Maya (“Donna F”) Ford’s chops. “Friends Like Mine” is so nondescript, it was over before I realised it even started. Memo to Atlantic: THE DONNAS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO SOUND LIKE BACKGROUND MUSIC. HELLO!!.
The acoustic (you read that right!) soft-shoe shuffling title track even throws a piano into the mix. Acoustic guitars?!? Pianos?!? On a Donnas album?!? Jesus Christ, what’s the world coming to. Listening to these 11 clunkers is like being bludgeoned to death with a bunch of bananas – it’s slow, annoying, and ultimately very painful. And even though there’s fleeting evidence of their early Runaways/Girlschool inspiration, this album is as flat as those early beacons of female punk’s (musical) suicide notes, And Now... and Play Dirty, which, coincidentally, were also produced by heavyweights in an attempt to move product (Thin Lizzy producer John Alcock and Slade’s Jimmie Lea and Noddy Holder, respectively).
One thing I never thought The Donnas would become was a pretentiously boring, 80’s hair band, but Gold Medal is definitely and unfortunately a bad hair day. Hopefully they’ve got this shit out of their system and if returning to the world of indie labels that spawned them is what it takes to get them back on track, so be it. You can help by avoiding this album at all costs. Hopefully Lookout will welcome the prodigal sisters back with open arms. My favorite lyric on the whole album comes from “It Takes One To Know One”—“Is this just a death wish?” Well, my dears, that’s entirely up to what you do next.
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