What’s left to say about Shonen Knife that hasn’t been said in the last 20 years since they came to the world’s attention after Kurt Cobain hailed them as his heroes and took them out on tour with Nirvana? 20 albums in a career spanning 33 years. Like The Fall, they just keep on churning ‘em out, and, like The Fall over the last 20 years, Shonen Knife albums sound like, well, Shonen Knife albums. So, if you’ve ever heard any of their previous albums, you’ve probably got a fair idea of what ‘Overdrive’ sounds like. If you happen to have been living in a cultural void for all eternity, it would be a fair summation that if The Ramones had been an all-female Japanese trio, they’d have sounded like Shonen Knife.
That said, ‘Overdrive’ leans heavily toward a more overtly ‘classic rock’ format: ‘Shopping’ may have some of the trashiest and brilliantly vapid lyrics around (‘Shopping, Shopping, I like shopping’ goes the chorus) but it also sounds like SK’s take on a ZZ Top riff, which is pretty cool. ‘Black Crow,’ too, takes a more ‘grown-up’ sounding approach, both musically and lyrically, adopting a classic new wave sound.
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The album also boasts some thudding bass and rollickin’ guitar breaks. The central riff on ‘Bad Luck Song’ sounds like ‘Pretty in Pink’ by The Psychedelic Furs’, but the bulk of the rest of the song, and the album, still pack in plenty of uptempo bubblegum pop with big, bouncy guitars. ‘Like a Cat’ features a brilliant refrain of ‘miaow, miaow, miaow’ ‘she doesn’t care about the past / she doesn’t care about the future / she doesn’t care about me because she’s busy grooming herself’, and the Quotastic ‘Jet Shot’ makes for a fitting finish to an album that it has to be said, only Shonen Knife could have recorded.
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