One of the funnier scenes in the wildly uneven Ben Stiller movie Starsky & Hutch took place at a 13-year-old girl's bat mitzvah, where a cover band with a goofy, fro-rocking frontman slithered its way through a down-and-squicky rendition of "Feel Like Makin' Love." Little did you know that this group was a going concern -- and a pretty hilarious one. Composed almost entirely of Top 40 "girl songs" spanning several decades ("I Am Woman," "Micky," "Milkshake," "Shoop," "Luka," etc.),
the Dan Band's live debut album is tight, well played, amazingly well sequenced and arranged, and surprisingly well sung. Frontman Dan Finnerty has a great voice and an equally great sense of irony -- he's capable of moving without hesitation and with supple agility from "You Oughta Know" right into "Que Sera Sera." He's also really, really enamored of the F word, which is especially distracting when he throws it in at points where it makes no sense -- like at the beginning of about every other phrase in "Total Eclipse of the Heart" or the
Irene Cara medley ("Flashdance/Fame"). That's the one aspect of his joke that falls flat, because it feels so forced and juvenile. Everything else about this album is an utter joy. ~ Rick Anderson