Magneta Lane CD Review
Magneta Lane
Dancing With Daggers
(Paper Bag)
“The female Strokes.” Gawd, that sounds awful, doesn’t it? With truth dripping from the likes of Sleater-Kinney, who needs a salty box of caged rage?
But a funny thing happened: Magneta Lane told us what they were on about. Forget obtuse invocations of the evil “you,” who has gone about fucking up lives for years, in their liners ML say Dancing With Daggers is like “giving in, but not without a fight.” And while the defeatism threatens to shoot, er, stab Daggers in the foot, it does so only in sequences where the band seem stuck at “7” on the volume levels (“Carnival In Spain”). Otherwise, when the shit’s bangin’ (“Broken Plates,” “Artistic Condition”) Magneta Lane are, too. Of course, The Strokes got by fine on album one; it was the second and third trips on which panties began to bunch.
— Kevin Keegan
