Elizabeth Daily. That's the name of the Valley Girl actress who later became the singer in the band that played various film proms: Better Off Dead, Summer School, some other shit. She did that 80s dance where her bobbing head, cocked arm, snapping hand, and suede-booted leg all moved in the same direction at the same time. She had Jersey mall hair. She was cool. Most of all, she had the most underrated film voice in history, a scratchy, scrappy, sandpapery bark. Elizabeth Daily's brilliantly craggy chirp-- the one that sang the line, "I'd be better off dead/ Than to live without you!" so passionately-- is now relegated to low-rent anime on American television and the occasional Nickelodeon film. God is fucking dead, people.
Maria Andersson, she's the lead singer in Sahara Hotnights, the Swedish four-girl garage rock band for whom America freaked its shit after the stateside release of their second full-length album, Jennie Bomb. Snarling, cool-smart-and-driving-'82-Monte-Carlo-real-fast kinda stuff peeled out of that record with a U-Haul of suave and sass: The Runaways, but better prepared. It reeked like cigarettes. Even with the vague stench of Def Leppard, Foreigner and Survivor's leather/pyro tunes, that record's focus was its masterful sneering riffage. It made chix visualize throwing punches as an assertion of their all-encompassing tuffness. Some of us, in fact, did so.
Sahara Hotnights' "Alright Alright (Here's My Fist Where's the Fight?)", from Jennie Bomb, made it onto soundtracks, but it's on their newly reissued first proper record, C'mon Let's Pretend, that Andersson sounds like the totally badassical Scandinavian incarnation of Elizabeth Daily. Shittier production quality, less anthemic assertion, and possibly the presence of weird guitar pedals ("Push on Some More" is dressed with a sorta gothic flanger) allow Ms. Andersson's vox to have a singular presence that got lost in Jennie Bomb's foggy urgency. That presence is craggy, vibrato-laden, overly dramatic, and has ingested more stray droplets of Aquanet than Lita Ford in the years '87-'88: i.e., Elizabeth Daily. The only thing missing is the dance, which Andersson eschews in favor of muscle-y precision fretwork. Whatever; this time it'll have to do.
But it's almost an entirely different band, this C'mon Let's Pretend-era Sahara Hotnights-- and in certain ways, it's a more original one. Unique embellishments extend beyond flange, in the form of breathless teenaged harmonies ("Too Cold for You"), grittier, more depressive songwriting (the surfy swagger of "Drive Dead Slow", "Impressed by Me"), and forlorn, Axl-invoking ballads ("Our Very Own", "I Know Exactly What to Do")-- less worldly, with a wider stylistic range. They weren't locked in to being a Garage Rock Band at that point, which resulted in a raw selection of arena weepers on par with Poison's "Something to Believe In", Lita & Ozzy's "Close My Eyes Forever" and Def Leppard's "Photograph".
In 1999, Sahara Hotnights were well on their way to being the featured band at the stoner prom. I like that melodic innocence better than their current Pelle-tainted rocker persona. C'mon was written before they left their tiny Swedish hometown, so it has the unfiltered angst and itchy friction of four chicks who just wanted to get the eff out. It was written before they got all cynical from American tours, critical bonerz, and too many dudes disclaiming their guitar heroics with "and they're hot, too." It's the sound of innocence, like night-long basement parties spent listening to cheesy 80s rock records: derivative in a naïve tributary fashion, while still glimmering with songwriting promise. You won't wanna throw a punch, but you can visualize the possibility.
