Is It Just That I’m Much Too Much For You?

Elastica were one of those bands that somehow transcended Britpop despite being right there in the center of the whole thing. Maybe it’s because “Stutter,” their first single, came out before Britpop really got going, back when the music papers were calling it “New Wave of New Wave” – I remember hearing it on the radio and completely loving it not because of the song, but because of the noise that opens it for the first five seconds before the song actually starts – or maybe it’s because, by the time their second album came about, Britpop was just a distant memory. It’s like they sidestepped being completely tagged with the Britpop label by ceasing to exist for all that time.

Of course, Elastica were the coolest band of that era, in a lot of ways. Part of it was Justine’s drawl, her doesn’t-give-a-fuck attitude that was weirdly sexy as the band ripped off Wire and anyone else they wanted and made it into an Elastica song with the spikey guitars and vomit noises and bored singing. They seemed at once both part of and out of step with everything that was happening culturally, and that was kind of their charm. Well, that and the fact that three of them were pretty cute (Sorry, Annie); they were like the indie Spice Girls that way.

(Here’s my embarrassing Elastica confession: Awhile after the album came out, my then-girlfriend and I were getting somewhat “intimate” when someone – probably me, although it’s equally possibly her; I’m simply taking responsibility because it seems dumb enough to be me in retrospect – decides that Elastica should be our fuck music. The two of us agreed that the album was curiously sexy and exciting and whatever, after all, so why not soundtrack our sex with it? Within maybe a minute of trying, we knew why; the burping and vomit noises we’d only semi-noticed before would turn out to be at first distracting, and then offputting, and we’d end up laughing instead of other, more vigorous activities.)

By the time The Menace, the band’s “difficult second album” appeared – five years after the first – the world had moved on, and part of that world seemed to have been the band’s mojo. It’s a sloppy, incomplete album, and more than half of it is the kind of thing you’ll never listen to twice. But there are parts where the old… ease, perhaps? not caring? their something shone through, and it felt like old times again. And then I caught sight of myself in the mirror, and realized that it really was five years later after all.