et’s dance. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues. I said, let’s dance, motherfucker! Put on your red shoes and kick someone’s teeth in, spray bourbon all over the wall, set fire to the curtains with your cigarette butt and punch in the security camera on your way out of the club. Now that’s more like it.

Raw And Rare, a live album serving as an unofficial follow-up to the Detroit based Von Bondie’s debut Lack Of Communication and as a teaser for Pawn Shoppe Heart, is a gutturally thrilling collection of raucous garage rock in the truest sense of the phrase. None of this self-conscious posturing and whingetastic skrank ‘n’ jangle that’s been served to us reheated after being dragged dead and then slapped alive again from the fridges of the rock crit jism donor centre. Just real tunes played with fervour and joy and more than a touch of unhinged terror. It’s a Mad Love of music that sends the fingers of Jason, Carrie and Marcie flying across the fret boards and Don’s bashing the skins. They’re not my hands, I tell you! I can’t control them—they just play this music and I, merely the vessel to carry them!

From the hysterical communist army chant of “It Came From Japan” (“We all Hail! Hail! From rock’n’roll!”) to the black widow blues of “My Baby’s Cryin’” to the screeching beseeching of “Please Please Man” and the frenzied claps of “Save My Life” (like “I Get Around” on bad crack and Sudafed), Jason and his pals don’t just feel rock’n’roll, they bleed it. Like those other garage alchemists The Kills, you get the feeling that the VBs could care less if you were there or not, thanks very much—they’re too possessed by this rock voodoo, this three chord Kundalini to care. This is as evident on the adrenaline-soaked shakedowns as it is on the more subdued tracks. In fact, it’s the slower/quieter numbers where you really get a sense of how deep this musical fever runs. Take the swampy thump of “Take A Heart”, where echoing Poison Ivy clangs, ride cymbal pings and razor-wire vocals are gradually stripped away until all that’s left is rock’n’roll cardiac surgery—an ECG of undulating bass eventually flatlines at song’s end. Or the B-Movie matinee horror of “The Sound Of Terror” with its Ed Wood vocals and mondo, molto Morricone yowls of guitar ecstasy.

Who cares what the rock tabloids have to say? Who cares why they’ve never scaled the heights that Messers White and/or Valentine have managed? The simple fact is that Raw And Rare is a distillation of the kind of rock’n’roll dementia that you’re lucky to catch live once or twice in your lifetime, let alone preserved forever for your living room or your padded cell. We all hail! Hail!