Audio By Carbonatix
I can admit it: I misjudged the Donnas. For their first several records I wrote off the Bay Area quartet as a cheap joke wrapped up in a cheaper gimmick: jailbait junior high girls playing black-leather garage rock about staying up all night and turning 21 and riding in cars with boys (not necessarily in that order). Their positioning in an indie milieu riddled with aging record-collector pervs all too happy to indulge the band’s off-color double entendres didn’t help, either. But with 2002’s Spend the Night, their major-label debut, the Donnas turned the joke on me; they’d zoomed past their inner Pat Benatars and straight into a bubblegum pleasure center their riot grrrl predecessors never reached–whether by choice or lack of wherewithal is for them to decide. Like their Swedish counterparts the Sahara Hotnights on their plastic, fantastic Kiss & Tell, on Gold Medal the Donnas ratchet up everything: tunes (the dreamy, shuffling “Is That All You’ve Got for Me”), riffs (the Heart-kickstarting “I Don’t Want to Know [If You Don’t Want Me]”), production (the bright-eyed “It’s So Hard”), even jokes (“I may not be a man, but you’re not one, either”). Touché, ladies.
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