The Twenty Twos

What’s left to imitate after all the boys have taken every band name beginning with “the”, put on their skinny ties and tainted the memory of the great music that defined 1970s New York with a hackneyed rehash? Well, we haven’t heard that much from the girls, at least not in the same format and quantity. A trio of styled-out, sultry ladies will, from a purely chauvinistic male perspective, always have some live appeal regardless of the sound they make — on record they will most likely be devoured by legions of aspiring young rockerettes. The second act at the Mercury Lounge on 29 July was nothing if not sexy, but delivered some good racket to boot — the crowd was less than enthusiastic but the music suffered little from their apathy. Most were there to see the headliner, Jesse Malin, so the opening acts were given marginal attention, the same way a salad is mindlessly scarfed down before the filet mignon is served up and slowly savored. Had the crowd of dripsters taken a minute to lend an interested ear to this new act, they might have liked sneery, growly, cutesy, Joan Jett-mulleted New York rockers the Twenty Twos. In a time when image reigns over substance, Jenny Christmas, Hannah Moorhead, Terrah Schroll and Jonny Cragg are able to effectively pull off both. Without hesitation they plunge right into fast, loud guitar, speed drumming and a chorus demanding “Whatcha doin'”, recalling louder pop-inflected ’70s punk as done by Parallel Lines-era Blondie. The material is lyrically straight-forward with the usual themes: I love you / What are you doing with her? / She’s gonna screw you over / You make me feel special / You’re a jerk, etc. Shrieks and groans to coy whispers and ballads in a sea of up-the-neck guitar work with a few cues from Roxy Music drama and Van Halen bombast. Tough and fiercely independent but sensitive and vulnerable as anyone else under the spell of a lover: the ironic duality of the punk girl. Metal to mash from one song to the next. The band’s four personalities fit their instruments well. Christmas leads with yells, shouts and guitar, Schroll’s got the naughty baby-doll vocals that climax to throaty screams as she tickles the electric ivories (and at times an over-the-shoulder Casio), Moorhead’s the quieter, brooding bass player, and Cragg (formerly of Spacehog) supplies the mustachioed testosterone on drums. The sound this quartet produces is not original per se — their influences are worn on their sleeves. The problem with a stylized image is that you’ve already been sized-up and judged before a single note is played. A band like Flock of Seagulls would have been the greatest anomaly of the ’80s if they’d taken their gravity-defying hairdos and cranked out some bluegrass. But they didn’t, so they weren’t. And so, the Twenty Twos don’t surprise anyone with their material but the tight arrangements and infectious glee win you over right from the start. They take the sparse 3-minute punk song form, add ’80s arena rock guitar lightning, a dab of Cars synth, thumping, cymbal-rife drum beats and somehow manage to sound fresh. Make no mistake, this music is meant to be fun, not picked to death (like I’ve just done here). So leave your overly hipped-out disposition at home when you go see these chicks and you’ll begin to remember why live shows with scrappy new bands can be such a good time. And then when they become the next Yeahs or Strokes, or whatever, you can say you saw them when — if that’s what pleases you.