New York Dolls Albums (8)
What The Critics Say
Five years into one of the most unlikely reunions in recent rock & roll history, the New York Dolls have begun to acknowledge the great paradox of the new edition of the band. If ever there was a band with a distinctive musical and emotional personality, it was the Dolls, but with only two members of the original lineup still alive and able to take the stage in 2009, David Johansen and Syl Sylvain have had a heavy burden to bear, trying to make music that feels and sounds like the New York Dolls without their iconic lead guitarist, their original rhythm section, and the sort of lifestyle that defined their world view when they were the edgiest band in America's toughest city. The new Dolls created a reasonable approximation of what their old sound would have been like had they all survived into the new millennium on 2006's One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, but 2009's 'Cause I Sez So suggests this band has little interest in living in the past, including their own. Todd Rundgren, who produced the Dolls' brilliant 1973 debut, was behind the controls for this set, and the first two songs, "'Cause I Sez So" and "Muddy Bones," conjure up the sloppy downtown energy of the Dolls Mk. 1 better than anything on One Day It Will Please Us, full of dirty guitars, crashing drums, and broadly strutting vocals from Johansen, complemented by Rundgren's roomy, natural-sounding production. But after that one-two punch, the album shifts gears, easing into a groove that's more easygoing and (gulp) mature than the classic Dolls assault, with a warmer and more subdued approach. "Lonely So Long" is a great pop tune with a faint resemblance to the Beatles, "Nobody Got No Bizness" is a high-spirited, hip-shaking R&B shuffle, "Temptation to Exist" is a melodramatic ballad that sounds like it could have fit onto one of Johansen's Buster Poindexter albums, "This Is Ridiculous" is a blues-influenced number that gives the singer plenty of room to showboat, and "Making Rain" edges uncomfortably into adult contemporary territory. As if to declare to anyone not paying attention that this isn't the Dolls as we remember them, there's a re-recording of "Trash" that puts a ganja-burnished reggae spin on the old proto-punk classic (possibly anticipating an adverse reaction from old fans, "Trash" is followed by "Exorcism of Despair," a chunky rocker very much in the traditional Dolls style). While the group as a whole sounds vital and in even better shape than they were on the fine One Day It Will Please Us, with its broad palate of musical influences and clear willingness to move past the constraints of the New York Dolls' legacy, 'Cause I Sez So is clearly David Johansen's album, and it's a great showcase for one of the great rock singers of his generation. But is it the New York Dolls? Well, that's what it says on the front cover, and if the sound is different, the "Whatsit to You?" spirit of this set is as keen as ever, and that counts for a lot with these guys. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide
'Live at the Fillmore East December 28 & 29, 2007'
Release Date 5/27/2008
Tracks 10
Label Sony
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What The Critics Say
If you're wondering how the New York Dolls played the Fillmore East when they didn't stagger out of the Mercer Art Center until 1971, the same year Bill Graham's East Coast rock palace closed, read the fine print -- the Fillmore in question is actually the renamed Irving Plaza (thanks for trivializing rock history, Clear Channel Communications!), and the band is the reconstituted version of the New York Dolls, who were touring in support of their studio comeback One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This in 2007. This is the second live set so far from the reunited Dolls (and with One Day that means the Dolls 2.0 have already released more albums than the original group did in its heyday), and while it lacks the gravity of Return of the New York Dolls (these shows were clearly not meant to be a major event, and Arthur Kane is sadly absent), the band sounds a lot tighter and more confident and rollicking on this disc. Steve Conte is not and never will be Johnny Thunders, but he's added just enough slop to his meat-and-potatoes hard rock chops to become a proper guitar partner for Sylvain Sylvain, and with Sami Yaffa and Brian Delaney holding down the backbeat and David Johansen reclaiming his title as one of rock & roll's great frontmen, this is a band that consistently, solidly delivers the goods. Of course, consistency or sounding tight was never really the point with the Dolls, and while this is quality entertainment, there's a certain element of danger and unpredictability that the New Dolls cannot reclaim from the Old Dolls. Significantly, while two tunes from One Day appear on the set list, 80 percent of the material here is drawn from New York Dolls and Too Much Too Soon, which suggests that no matter how hard they try, these Dolls members will never escape the burden of their past. But aging New York hipsters have as much of a right to nostalgia as anyone else, and Live at the Fillmore East offers audible proof that Johansen and his pals are giving the folks who show up their money's worth, whatever their reason for checking out the gig. Oh, and speaking of consistency, the cover art for this disc is every bit as ugly as the dozens of semi-bootleg Dolls live discs that have been littering stores for years, one tradition the new edition of the band didn't need to follow. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide
'One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This'
Release Date 7/24/2006
Tracks 14
Label Roadrunner
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What The Critics Say
The prospect of a new studio album from the New York Dolls in the year 2006 is a strange and puzzling thing, especially without the presence of Johnny Thunders, Arthur Kane, and Jerry Nolan, all of whom are currently gigging on another astral plane. But after the Dolls made an unexpected and surprisingly convincing return to the concert stage in 2004, David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain, and their newly appointed partners started writing new material and took the risky step of taking the new band into the studio a mere 32 years after Too Much Too Soon. One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This has two major hurdles to clear for anyone who cared about the Dolls: they have to create something akin to the sloppy majesty of their two iconic studio albums without the help of ace guitar mauler Thunders, and they have to write songs with the same gritty blare and strutting attitude that came as second nature when they were twenty-somethings. Musically, this version of the Dolls is much more precise than they ever were back in the day, but the opening track, "We're All in Love," captures a fair share of the rattly subway train rhythm that was the Dolls aural trademark, and most of these tunes don't aim for the same degree of rock action as the group's most famous tunes, there's still an admirable crash-and-bash energy on "Gimme Luv and Turn on the Light" and "Dance Like a Monkey," and there are clear gestures towards the Dolls' other sonic touchstones: vintage girl group sounds ("Rainbow Store"), old-school R&B ("Take a Good Look at My Good Looks"), the blues ("I Ain't Got Nothin'"). Just as importantly, David Johansen hasn't sung rock & roll with this kind of strength, authority, and guts in years, and guitarists Sylvain and Steve Conte crank out the fire without too much audible worry about the weight of the past. (It also helps that the rhythm section is right on the money and Jack Douglas delivers the muscular but unobtrusive production this band always needed and never got.) As for the songs, with their frequent philosophical musings and multisyllabic constructions, this is heady stuff coming from what was once was a band of decadent street punk fashion mavens, but let's face it, one of the reasons Johansen and Sylvain survived and their bandmates didn't is they had a vision of the future that went further than the next party and the next fix, and the best songs on this album look at where these guys have been and where they're going with a mixture of intelligence, perception, and street smarts. And if you're just looking for dumb fun, "Dance Like a Monkey" delivers. On One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, the New York Dollsare a far cry from the band that recorded "Personality Crisis" in 1972, but the album offers a reasonable approximation of the Dolls as smart, battle-hardened survivors who've got something to say and have a few laughs while saying it. If it's not quite a triumph, it's challenging and ambitious stuff that rocks on out and doesn't tarnish the memory of what Johansen and Sylvain accomplished so many years ago. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide
'The Return of the New York Dolls: Live from Royal Festival Hall, 2004'
Release Date 9/28/2004
Tracks 15
Label Attack
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What The Critics Say
Reunion shows by bands with a major creative legacy are always a problematic matter, and when Morrissey persuaded the surviving members of the New York Dolls to play a set at the 2004 Meltdown Festival in London (which he curated), lots of fans wondered aloud if David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Kane had any real business calling this band the Dolls without the presence of deceased guitar hero Johnny Thunders (and to a lesser extent, without similarly absent drummer Jerry Nolan). Of course, audience sentiment is a fickle thing, and since the Meltdown gig turned out to be one of the last public appearances for Arthur Kane -- who, with typical bad luck, died due to undiagnosed leukemia a few weeks after the show preserved on this album -- this recording now stands as a tribute to the fallen bassist, who desperately wanted a gig like this to happen many years before it finally became a reality. So it's appropriate that while this doesn't quite sound like the New York Dolls, it does sound like the best Dolls tribute band you could ever ask for. While Sylvain and Kane doubtless added a lot in terms of vibe and esprit de corps, what really makes the difference sonically is Johansen; since he became a solo artist, he's displayed a certain ennui towards the Dolls' legacy, occasionally visiting their songs out of seeming obligation rather than enthusiasm, but here he sings his old songbook with real passion, commitment and force, and if his voice is deeper and less supple than it was in 1972, it's his juice that really brings this gig to life -- if this doesn't sound like the band that tottered on outsized platforms at the Mercer Arts Center, Johansen's performance suggest those days are still clear in his mind, and he's determined to reclaim their spirit in this show. Guitarist Steve Conte lacks Thunders' otherworldly snazz, but then again he doesn't make as many mistakes as Johnny did in his latter days, and drummer Gary Powell and keyboardist Brian Koonin fill their spots with aplomb; they're pros who obviously love this music and attack it with the affection it deserves. So, no, this isn't really the New York Dolls, but you'd have to be a great curmudgeon to fault the participants for use of the name, and this band of veterans and pretenders certainly did right by their mighty legacy on the evening these tapes rolled. Bye bye, Arthur. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide
'From Paris with L-U-V'
Release Date 1/22/2002
Tracks 13
Label Sympathy for the Record Industry
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What The Critics Say
This is yet another release of the New York Dolls' legendary Paris radio concert. Featuring 11 of their glam rock anthems in all their sweat-soaked glory, this album previews the sort of venom and energy that punk rock would later make its own. Fans of the band are advised to get this if they have not run across this concert on album before; it is one of the cornerstones of a New York Dolls collection. ~ Bradley Torreano, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
After the clatter of their first album failed to bring them a wide audience, the New York Dolls hired producer Shadow Morton to work on the follow-up, Too Much Too Soon. The differences are apparent right from the start of the ferocious opener, "Babylon." Not only are the guitars cleaner, but the mix is dominated by waves of studio sound effects and female backing vocals. Ironically, instead of making the Dolls sound safer, all the added frills emphasize their gleeful sleaziness and reckless sound. The Dolls sound on the verge of falling apart throughout the album, as Johnny Thunders and Syl Sylvain relentlessly trade buzz-saw riffs while David Johansen sings, shouts, and sashays on top of the racket. Band originals -- including the bluesy raver "It's Too Late," the noisy girl-group pop of "Puss N' Boots," and the Thunders showcase "Chatterbox" -- are rounded out by obscure R&B and rock & roll covers tailor-made for the group. Johansen vamps throughout Leiber & Stoller's "Bad Detective," Archie Bell's "(There's Gonna Be A) Showdown," the Cadets "Stranded in the Jungle," and Sonny Boy Williamson's "Don't Start Me Talkin'," yet it's with grit and affection -- he really means it, man! The whole record collapses with the scathing "Human Being," on which a bunch of cross-dressing misfits defiantly declare that it's OK that they want too many things, 'cause they're human beings, just like you and me. Three years later, the Sex Pistols failed to come up with anything as musically visceral and dangerous. Perhaps that's why the Dolls never found their audience in the early '70s: Not only were they punk rock before punk rock was cool, but they remained weirder and more idiosyncratic than any of the bands that followed. And they rocked harder, too. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
With only a pair of official albums issued during their brief tenure as a band together (1973's self-titled debut and '74's Too Much Too Soon), the New York Dolls has been the subject of numerous postmortem releases. While many just repackaged tracks from the two aforementioned albums, others, like 1992's Seven Day Weekend, collected previously unheard demos from sessions prior to the recording of their debut album (recorded in March 1973 at Planet Studios in New York City). Featuring a total of 19 tracks, the sound quality is excellent -- the band manages to play the tracks even rawer than how they would turn out on their two albums (probably not far from what the Dolls sounded like in concert at the time). In addition, there are several tracks that never made it on subsequent releases -- the title track, "Back in the USA," "Endless Party," "Great Big Kiss," and "Hootchie Cootchie Man." But the real highlights are the rough readings of such Dolls classics as "Jet Boy," "Lonely Planet Boy," "Subway Train," "Vietnamese Baby," "Trash," "Human Being," "Private World," and "Babylon," many of which top the officially-released album versions. Serious New York Dolls fans will definitely enjoy these rough and ready historical recordings. ~ Greg Prato, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
There are hints of girl group pop and more than a hint of the Rolling Stones, but The New York Dolls doesn't really sound like anything that came before it. It's hard rock with a self-conscious wit, a celebration of camp and kitsch that retains a menacing, malevolent edge. The New York Dolls play as if they can barely keep the music from falling apart and David Johansen sings and screams like a man possessed. The New York Dolls is a noisy, reckless album that rocks and rolls with a vengeance. The Dolls rework old Chuck Berry and Stones riffs, playing them with a sloppy, violent glee. "Personality Crisis," "Looking for a Kiss," and "Trash" strut with confidence, while "Vietnamese Baby" and "Frankenstein" sound otherworldly, working the same frightening drone over and over again. The New York Dolls is the definitive proto-punk album, even more than anything the Stooges released. It plunders history while celebrating it, creating a sleazy urban mythology along the way. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
