60 Foot Dolls

Douglas Wolk reviews 60 Foot Dolls' album "The Big 3".

By Douglas Wolk

Jan 27, 1997 | Spinal Tap, as you may remember, weren't just a lunkhead heavy-metal band, they continually reinvented themselves as lunkhead practitioners of whatever style happened to be in fashion, from Merseybeat to psychedelia to glam. So in the wake of a recent wave of British guitar-rock bands like Oasis, Elastica and Blur, the appearance of the tuneful, hard-rocking, utterly derivative Welsh trio 60 Ft Dolls is a little suspicious. Could boyish, short-haired singer-songwriters Richard Parfitt and Mike Cole secretly be David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel with facelifts and new leather jackets?

The evidence on "The Big 3" is pretty strong. For starters, there's the way Parfitt's thuggish rasp and Cole's sweeter lilt occasionally snap together into dead-on harmonies, as if they'd been doing it for 30 years. The huge dopey riffs that power songs like "New Loafers" are worthy of "Hell Hole." Even more Tap-like is the conviction with which the Dolls sing mindbogglingly dumb lyrics. In 1997, it's probably not permissible to rhyme "be all right" with "stay the night" under any circumstances, but Parfitt tears into the line with such a convincing approximation of passion that he nearly pulls it off (too bad he runs into "it would be OK/if I could stay" a few seconds later). By the time he sings "Mary goes round, drugs made Mary vague/See how she cries my little methadone maid," it's clear that tuning out the words is a good idea.

Another hallmark of the Parfitt-Cole team, and Tufnel-St. Hubbins, is a classicism that verges on plagiarism. Nearly every song here is in straightforward verse-chorus-bridge form, and in these days of post-everything structure, it's kind of quaint to hear a good old-fashioned middle eight. But the Dolls' idea of originality is ripping off Beatles songs that Oasis hasn't gotten to yet: the "you can talk to me" bit from "Hey Bulldog" becomes the chorus of "Talk To Me," and "Terminal Crash Fear" has a few lines lifted almost verbatim from "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window." Their idea of stretching out is ripping off Van Morrison songs instead.

The Dolls get a surprising amount of mileage out of their dogged rock 'n' roll atavism - "The Big 3's" guitar sound mixes a nicely grungy crunch with a hair-metal squeal, and the hooks mostly stick where they're supposed to. But it only takes them so far. In fact, the biggest clue to 60 Ft Dolls' true identity is their Tap-like absolute reliance on the power of clichi: Their songs rock because they're obvious. You've heard every whammy-bar-waggling, distortion-pedal-tapping move on here before, so your reptile brain is already primed to dig it. Tonight they're gonna rock you tonight.

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