Blue Van

Originality is nice, but it’s no substitute for a big old bag of greasy, grimy rock’n’roll. The Blue Van are a shaggy pack of tousle-haired retro-rockers from the mean streets of Copenhagen blessed with more scruffy rave-ups and slippery grooves than a four-disc Nuggets comp. Jammed with vintage summer of ’71 riffs stamped "Product of Tacoma, WA, USA,” the Danish foursome’s debut is a punchy slab of garage rock revivalism replete with Hammond fills, deliriously hollered "yeah, yeah, yeahs” and buckets of cocksure insolence. They gleefully footnote classic sources like the Sonics, the Electric Prunes and Blues Magoos while pirating like-minded contemporaries the Mooney Suzuki and Tokyo Sex Destruction with flagrant disregard for intellectual copyright laws. The only real drawback is the indistinctness of some of the songs which, about 20 minutes in, start to blur together into a seamy fuzz-rock haze. Still, any band that can pull off a rollicking eight-minute blues vamp like Rolling’s Hammond-heavy closer "New Slough” or deliver emphatic balderdash like "What the young people want/They wanna wear flared jeans” as if it were the gospel has got to be doing something right.