The D4 formed in Auckland, New Zealand in 1998. They released a handful of singles and two albums, 6twenty (2001) and Out Of My Head (2005), before calling it quits in 2006. The band landed on my shores in the “rock and roll aughts” along with the other Neo Garage outfits from that loud era, and I immediately fell in love with the their debut, a rip-roaring, top-to-bottom R&R onslaught of righteous twin-guitar riffs, eighth-note rhythms, and fiery playing. Guitarists Jimmy Christmas and Dion Lunadon, bassist Vaughn Williams, and drummer Rich Mixture played with hurtling precision. Paradox intended. When their albums are over I’m upside down.
If it sounds as if I’m describing feral rock and roll, well, yeah. The band’s name originated in an offhand remark Lunadon’s Dad was heard to make upon meeting his son’s scruffy bandmates: “You guys are like the D4,” he cracked, “like four rabid dogs that should have been taken out the back a long time ago and shot.” That fervent vibe thrums through 6twenty, a kind of Platonic Ideal to this fan, a mining of the sonic terrain roamed by the Stooges, the Heartbreakers, early Ramones, the Sweet, and Slade, filtered through the lingering smoke of First Wave New Zealand and Australian punk rock bands. Revivalists? Hardly. Nothing this palpably exciting can be reduced simply to a genre or a category. Your heart resists such irrelevant thinking. With the Star Spangles and the Hives—New York City and Sweden spirit-cousins, respectively, to the New Zealand band—the D4 were plugged into an eternal current that hummed and that hums.
Christmas sang the D4’s songs, and he was the band’s secret weapon. Along with Jason Stollsteimer from The Von Bondies, Christmas possessed to my ears one of the greatest, most expressive rock and roll voices of the 2000s, headlong and unique. He sang and he sounded desperate, as if there wasn’t much time left in the studio, but also as if he was having the night of his life and hoped, maybe even figured, that it would never end. He sounds in control, but also as if things might come crashing down at any moment. (There’s distortion in his mic levels, too. Audio verité.) He’s brash, nervy, possibly obnoxious, and appealing as hell, his cocky belief in his necessity to exist in front of you wholly persuasive. As evidenced by the mock-applause at the end of most songs, he’s winning. So that’s what his voice does. When he sings, on “Party,” “Well it’s the weekend, c’mon,” any last bit of jadedness evaporates in the heat of the moment. You feel like what teenagers must’ve felt hearing Eddie Cochran for the first time. (Lunadon often sang along on mic, a dual party threat.)
“Party,” Running On Empty,” “Get Loose,” “Exit to the City.” These are songs about the city, having nothing to do in the city, weekends in the city, having nothing to do on weekends in the city, the distractions that are drugs, booze, and girls, and the songs that, if they won’t make sense of the urgency of the sensations, will at least express them. (A cover of the 1970s New Zealand/Australian punk band Scavengers’ “Mysterex” is the rare display of social commentary on 6twenty.)
“Exit To The City” complicates things a bit, if only in terms of pacing: the song crawls relative to the hopped-up speed of much of the album, a graphic way to suggest the inevitable come-down of hard living. (There’s even a head-clearing few bars in half-time near the end of the song). Christmas sings of cruising on the highway, a bag of drugs (or a gun?) in his lap; he’s buzzed, “ready to roll,” “looking for something.” The chorus—
This time I’ll take the exit
This time I’m getting off
—feels like a truce of sorts between the singer’s nerves and his better instincts, or maybe it’s the song’s mid-pace that suggests to me he’s doing any thinking at all. Is the exit to mayhem, or home? Fucked-up-ness, or calm? There’s more weight given to the opening and closing of things: 6twenty roars out of the gate with “Rock’n’roll Motherfucker” (‘nuff said) and closes with the wondering “Exit To The City.” The journey starts off with clarity and end with ambiguity. Sounds like a pretty typical night of partying to me.
Do D4 songs trade in clichés? Does that matter?
I’ve asked myself that second question about music I love too any times to count, tethered to headphones at home or in a sweaty, packed club—in the event, the decibels usually render the question meaningless. Hackneyed phrases and well-worn insights begin for all of us as startling, head-lifting epiphanies, the newness of discovery as fresh as a early-Spring breeze, and as spirited, too. Does it matter that the D4 sing about girls, drinking, and partying as if the lads are discovering that triumvirate for the first time? I’ve wondered long and hard over the years about whether it’s rock and roll’s responsibility to “make it new,” a charge that the poet Ezra Pound laid at the feet of his fellow artists a hundred years ago, or to plug in to the eternal current that in its charge revives old forms without destroying them.
“Cliché is the death of art,” I caution my writing students; in a parallel universe where I’m teaching a songwriting workshop, I don’t know that I’d be quite as allergic to platitudes if they’re delivered in riffs, hooks, and a killer, gang-sung chorus. For better or worse, I tend to lose myself in the instant of a D4 song’s exuberance, where everything feels new, where nothing feels banal. Only later, my ears ringing, might I question the value of yet another new, guitar-forward rock and roll song about old stuff. But as the wise folk tell us, all we have is the present moment that we’re lucky enough to exist in.
Of course, I’m the guy who on some days semi-seriously entertains the thought that most rock and roll bands should’ve hung it up after Van Halen recorded the epic “Everybody Wants Some!!” So how can I be trusted?
It must be said that the D4’s follow-up album fails to maintain the energy of the debut. “We went straight into making that second record after a heap of touring, and we should really have taken some time off and regrouped,” Christmas remarked in 2018 to Grant Smithies in Stuff. “Our American record company [Hollywood Records] made a few unfortunate decisions over what songs we should release next to recoup their investment in us, but we should have stuck to the rugged and raw stuff that had made a lot of people love us in the first place.”
Out Of My Head begins characteristically with a rousing celebration of drink (in this case a sake bomb) and streaks through familiar terrain, though the slow, blues-y “Stops Me Cold” does detour. “Peepshow” is a caution (if a really rocking one). In it the singer half brags/half complains about his girlfriend’s new job; she’s downtown dancing for “two minutes at a time” in front of dollar-feeding men, and she never comes home anymore. He’s plagued with jealousy, but in the song she only comes alive as his problem: “I take my money and push it in the slot / When she starts moving then I don’t feel so alone.” I would’ve loved to have heard a verse or two from her perspective, about her agency, but the D4 won’t go there. A shame. The trifling Mafia drama “Omertà” shows the guys widening their interests a bit, but I like it best when Christmas stays local, singing about his shitty car or shitty apartment, on the way to night out that might temporarily redeem things.
Yet one song on Out Of My Head nearly redeems the whole joint. “What I Want” is one of the great rock and roll singles of the mid-aughts, a perpetual motion machine between uncertainty and doubt. The chorus reduces the singer’s dilemma to something ancient—“I don’t know what I want / Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s somebody new”—but the stakes are raised in the verses, which are far more interesting, a series of tortured should’s and could’s that the band’s crashing performance tries to erase yet can’t. Should I get up or sleep? Answer the phone or let it ring? Find somebody to talk to or sit around on my own?
I could save all my money, I could blow it all now
I could work on my body, just give up on my health
Keep on pushin’, I could fall on my knees
I could try to get famous, I could try to get free
I could live for today, I could plan for my future
I could be dead, I could be richer
Nothing’s resolved by the end, of course. The best moment is small: at the end of the first chorus the band drops out and Christmas’s plaintive “I don’t know” is met with a squall of guitar feedback in the right channel, a sympathetic or a mocking response, it’s hard to know. Maybe feedback is indifferent.
It’s funny what can happen when you love a band that lives halfway around the world and that you never caught live. In the 1980s I immoderately dug The Milkshakes, a band based in Chatham, England that rarely set foot in America. Because of that, the group felt vaguely fictitious to me, as if I’d dreamed them up even though I had the import albums as proof of their existence. (You can read my tribute to the Milkshakes here. A decade later, I stand by every word.)
A similar phenomenon occurred for me with The D4. Even well into the Internet age, the band seemed very far away from me. U.S. visits were scarce. They played SXSW in Austin in 2002, and the Underground Garage Festival and Bowery Ballroom in New York in 2004. If Setlist is accurate, the D4 spent the majority of their career gigging in their home country and Australia, with occasional mini-swings through Europe and England. It’s frightfully expensive for an Oceania-based band to tour North America, and the D4’s gigging window was small anyway. The upshot: I never got close to them. Save for the odd video online and photos in CD booklets, the D4 were theoretical to me. Until I cranked up their music. And even then, after getting off on their beery, driving, eighth-note noise, I’d still feel as if I’d been on the outside looking in, lamenting the fact that I couldn’t see them in a small club or venue, where the music, and the men making it, would be real.
But the D4 is real, alright. Last March, they reunited for an eight-show swing across New Zealand to promote the vinyl reissue of 6twenty. Speaking to Radio New Zealand 101 on the eve of the tour, Christmas was practical about the wear and tear of detonating onstage these days. “I think you just have to manage your parts a little bit, you know, your body parts,” he remarked. “And we pay attention to, you know, our tools of trade. You know, like me and Dion, we’re pretty serious about warming up our vocals and things like that. We want to be as good as we can be, so we’re taking the time to do that.”
I mean, the energy on stage is real up there and what’s different now is, we always had intention, you know, approached it with fierce intent. But motivations is kind of different now, you know, like, we don’t have anything to prove to anybody. And we know that people that are coming to see us are wanting to celebrate with us.
He added, “We’re just very grateful for the opportunity to do something like this.” I hope that one day that something includes another visit to the U.S.
Between sx and ny/nj, i got to see them a lot-always great. Theirs is the most ubiquitous promo cd like...ever. In the early 00s i had piles of them, and saw piles of them everywhere...and I still see them occasionally!
Great read!