After one listen to
Supergroupies' self-titled debut record, you might start taking down some posters on your bedroom wall to make room for their glammy faces. The bandmembers hail from Sweden, deck themselves out in makeup, sport matching platinum blond feather cuts, and even rock the occasional feather boa. But all fears of a hair metal revival are quashed by the opening notes of the album's opener, "Give It All You Got," which rocks hard but in the power pop manner of vintage
Redd Kross, not
Poison. To that end, the band is definitely more
Sweet than
Kiss, more Hanna-Barbera than Headbangers Ball, more bubblegum than Jack Daniels. About the only recent group to have anything truly in common with
Supergroupies is
Tsar (the
Tsar of their debut album, that is, not the punks of Band-Girls-Money) and maybe, in a stretch,
the Darkness. The album is a nonstop blitz of hooks, huge choruses, flashy guitar solos, handclaps, and endearingly silly lyrics. Kim Simon has a perfectly brash teenage croon, the production is glossy but packs a real punch, and the band's energy never flags. The high quality of the songs never drops off, either, as nearly every one is a perfect blast of glittery nonsense. The best of them are quite spectacular, and in a perfect world the effervescent "Bouncin'" would be a huge smash, teenage girls would be screaming
Beatlemania style to sweet ballads like "Summertime" and "Tonight with Love," neo-rockers would be rocking their iPods with primitive tracks like "You Will Do" and "Hot in Paris," and the album would be available in America. Probably the most one can hope for is the last, but it doesn't hurt to dream. You should really try to get your hands on this disk -- that is, if you have any desire for a record with brains and brawn, with teenage soul and a non-winking sense of fun, and with songs good enough to actually stand toe to toe with those of their heroes and not come off like weak imitations.
Supergroupies may never make it in the rock game, but on the basis of this one record, they are already stars. ~ Tim Sendra