You drop the metaphorical needle on Give Me All Your Money and wonder: What godforsaken little shrub have these guys been hiding behind for the past 30 years? Truth be told, they were at best toddlers, if even born, in the new-wave dawn of the early 70’s. But music has a way of infecting the not-quite-fully-wired hemispheres of children that parents can only dread, and never inoculate against; someone, somewhere in front man Matt Dunehoo’s earliest years, had a damn fine record collection.
Which is not to say Doris Henson is riding the same wagon with this year’s crop of retro-futurist new-new-wavers. On the contrary, they quite simply sound like a band you read about in Trouser Press in 1984, and after 2 decades of combing through mildewy bins at used record stores, you finally come across a time capsule that sounds every bit as new now as it would have then, if anyone had ever actually heard it. Even its production values, tube-smashed to the midrange, speak of a time when music was less obsessed with digital perfection, and relied instead on composition, arrangement, and the organic gestalt of five guys in a room plus instruments and a tape machine.
So, who is Doris Henson? Back to the shrubbery for this: five guys from Lawrence and/or Kansas City, Missouri, recently of now-defunct non-famous underground rock bands (most notably, bassist Byron Collum did time in the excellent Giants Chair), got together in Spring of 2002 to make gloriously unaffected but positively inspired rock music. That comes off reading like a mission statement, rather than the happy accident it may be, but the result is the same. Dunehoo and his friends have cobbled together a true throwback: a really remarkable, pretension-free rock record.
You keep waiting for Give Me All Your Money to get cynical, for the band to cop a schtick in a play for cool (the closest they come is trombone-wielding, mustachioed multi-instrumentalist Mike Walker). It never happens. On the contrary, the record is a wash of guitar and vocal harmonies from top to bottom, never pausing long enough to get self-conscious or radio-friendly. In an anti-commercial, 70’s rock vein, this record qualifies as, for want of a better term, album-oriented rock. That may be a curse in this age of “modern rock,” but Doris Henson is what it is, and the record is glued together with marvelously elegant and powerfully played “rock” songs, not singles.
These days, in a cacophony of can-they-be-serious-or-does-it-really-matter rock bands (The Strokes, The Darkness, Interpol all come to mind for starters) it must be incredibly difficult for a band like Doris Henson to figure out anything else to call themselves besides “a rock band.” The songs are rhythmically heavy; guitars and vocal harmonies drive hummable, often heartbreaking
melodies. Try “Dark Time for the Light Side of the Earth” on for size; then skip ahead to the desperate optimism of “Big Future.” Chase that with the aggressive, up-tempo “Day is Done,” and finish with the gorgeous, cataclysmic “Sidestepping.” You’ll be missing loads of high points and great songs in between, but you’ll start to get the point. Do not let a record like Give Me All Your Money go unheard again.
