At this point in music history, toying with stereotypes of Germans playing music that doesn’t sound, well, playful does come with a slight twinge of guilt and deserves a bit of a groan. But really, besides maybe Can’s “Turtles Have Short Legs,” how many songs can you name from Germany that send you into fits of teenage home-alone dancing like a giddy Molly Ringwald in her younger days? Or, for that matter, like Jane Fonda (nicknamesake of the band at hand) doing aerobics in one of her era-defining workout videos? Not too many, really, which is just part of what makes Hanoi Janes’ debut such a pleasure to listen (and jump around) to.
After the pathetically early death of Jay Reatard this past New Year, fans were left wondering who would inherit the monumental task of continuing what he started, but along comes Sachsen's Oliver Scharf to pick up the Reatarded torch and show the Yanks how to have fun again, with the Janes' sunshininess filtered through home-recorded DIY fidelity and enough stop-starts and syncopation (as on “Good Bone”) to keep spirits up and the body moving for a whopping 31 minutes (and that’s 15 tracks too, like the way it used to be!). It’s the small sonic details, like the occasional frantically-strummed nylon-string guitar instead of an electric, frame-tapping as an alternative to keeping time with a hi-hat, and an aggressively frenetic approach to tempo and rhythm that further suggest that Stephen Pope and Billy Hayes would have been better off working for Sgt. Scharf instead.
Don’t make their mistake—choose Hanoi Janes!