THE VON BONDIES

Forming in Detroit in 2000, the Von Bondies were formerly known as the Baby Killers. Maintaining the Motor City's intense sound tradition, the Bondies settled on conceiving original sounds within the garage rock and alternative sways.

Constituted by Jason Stollsteimer (vocals, guitar), Marcie Bolen (guitar), Carrie Smith (bass), and Don Blum (drums), the Bondies present a delirious compound of punk rock's fiery tunes driving through raving guitar riffs and strong rhythms. It Came From Japan and Nite Train emerged as the band's first recordings in late 2000, months before the quartet settled on recording their debut full-length disc. Lack of Communication, the crew's first album, offered in 2001 via the Sympathy for the Record Industry label, secured an important acclaim all across the local underground scene, acknowledging the band's compositions with even more projection.

Following the release of the record in late 2001, the band entered an extensive European tour as the opening act for Detroit's White Stripes, therefore strengthening even more their on-growing recognition, not only in the U.S., but also in Europe. 2003 was a busy year for the group — along with playing the Coachella Festival, they also released Raw and Rare, (and will be releasing) as well Pawn Shoppe Heart, which is produced by Jerry Harrison.
- Mario Mesquita Borges

Dim Mak Releases:
DM053: The Von Bondies "Raw and Rare" CD (LP TBA) Co-release with Intheact Records

Other releases that feature Von Bondies members on Dim Mak:
DM051: Mr. David Viner "Mr. David Viner" CD

Press

Updated 09/16/04
Stylus Magazine

Von Bondies- Raw and Rare (Dim Mak)

"Let's dance. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues. I said, let's dance, motherfucker! Put on your red shoes and kick someone's teeth in, spray bourbon all over the wall, set fire to the curtains with your cigarette butt and punch in the security camera on your way out of the club. Now that's more like it.

Raw And Rare, a live album serving as an unofficial follow-up to the Detroit based Von Bondie's debut Lack of Communication and as a teaser for Pawn Shoppe Heart, is a gutturally thrilling collection of raucous garage rock in the thruest sense of the phrase..."

Click here for full review

Updated 08/03/04
The Big Takeover




Von Bondies-Raw and Rare (DIM MAK)

Raw and Rare is superb Detroit Rock 'n' Roll captured and recorded live in July of 2002. This band just does what it does, and does it better than most: They swing and swagger straight up to you. They sneer, wind, and then give you a great big kiss. The songs may be raw and rare, indeed, but they've got more heart'n'soul going through each guitar string than most of those garage train jumpers have in their entire band. The songs shift from an almost Cramps vibe to a more Japanese noise rock 'n' roll explosion, like Blues Explosion, White Stripes... you know the style. While the Von Bondies move along some of the same garage door alleys, they have a habit of picking better doorways to go through.

Updated 07/23/04
X-Ray

Words: Victoria Segal

*The Von Bondies
Dingwalls, London

GOD KNOWS what it would take for The Von Bondies to screw up tonight's show: strolling on stage in Gap denimsa for a set of Bryan Adams songs, perhaps, or maybe a spot of performance poetry. All it takes is one guitar clang, one twitch of Jason Stollsteimer's whiplash hips, and Detroit's new wave have won the game.

Maybe it's all a little too easy. Bassist Carrie Smith, jolie-laide style queen, and the Manga-tough guitarist Marcie Bolen, play it cool enough to frost the front row's beer while Stollsteimer pouts and thrusts through the snaggle-toothed racket. "We all hail rock'n'roll" chime Marcie and Carrie, and their commitment to the impulses driving these basement-dank songs isn't in doubt. They might provide a vanilla sex-appeal compared with the Lord-knows chemistry of the Stripes, but the charge is undeniable: when Marcie admits her guitar is slippery with sweat, the lustful intake of audience breath is the stuff of Vice Squad case files.

Yet for all the laconic riffs, iconic poses and on-a-dime cool, it's only with the closing appearance of ludicrous stage-stealers The Datsuns that things get truly untethered and the noise starts to ring out on its own messy terms. As a rock'n'roll summit, tonight was a blast-whether it's a peak, though, remains to be seen.

01/27/04 Updated
powerpop.org
"Raw and Rare" proves that The Von Bondies can raise a ruckus. The jury is still out, however, on whether or not it can excite the rock & roll world in a manner similar to The White Stripes and its ilk. In the meantime, this album offers the curious a window of opportunity to peek in at The Von Bondies during its formative stages


01/06/04 Updated
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS AUGUST 31/02

A sweat-drenched guy in a JJ72 T-shirt emerges, shell-shocked from The Von Bondies'vast moshpit. He's clutching a trainer. Then he collapses, happy, into a heap. People are scaling the tent posts, and it's only 1pm. It's been that kind of a quarter of an hour.
Hell, it's been that kind of year: one where The VBs' two-boy, two-girl primal boogie was whipped all sorts of people into all sorts of flushed shapes. Bands who get a leg up from their more famous friends (in their case, The White Stripes) as well as The Strokes are rarely this awesome: tight as a suture, tense as brinkmanship, playing the music of romantic insecurity (like their sublime opener, "Lack Of Communication") with brutal confidence.
Flanked by the world's coolest women, Marcie Bolen and Carrie Smith, Jason Stollsteimer risks a rare smile at his obviously expanding. And then-too fast, too soon- it's "Rock'n'Roll Nurse", and a mass clap along ends this rare glimpse of The Von Bondies" dark, illicit power in daylight. Next year, it's the Main Stage after dusk or there is no justice.
Kitty EMPIRE


11/17/03 Updated

RAW AND RARE REVIEWS

READ MAGAZINE
Aw yeah. If you've never heard the Von Bondies, now's your chance to be introduced to them the way they should be experienced - live! They're everything a good rock n' roll band should be - loud, raucous, bluesy, and fun. Check out "Going Down", "It Came From Japan", "Cryin', and "Save My Life" and tell me they don't have the perfect rock sound DOWN - I mean, it's like early Blue Oyster Cult meets the Cramps. 120% ROCK!


Detroit Free Press

This fifteen song compilation , culled principaly from live sessions cut for the BBC in 2001 and 2002, is maint to tide the faithful over until the Von Bondies' major label debut arrives this fall. Much is ridding on that still-in-progress record, as most rock'n'roll pundets have picked the Von Bondies are the next garage bands to make a long claim from the gutter to the stars. This tracks, including versions of most of the songs from the 2001 jack write-produced "lack of communition" (with "crying'" and "it came from Japan" represented twice). Show that this faith is not missplaced. You can ear the band gaining in assurance and authority as this sessions progress, culminating in two low- but deliriously rendered songs recorded at the lager house last July. Bolen on "My Baby's crying" and drummer done blum on the composive Gambles' great "Rock'n'roll Nurse" are also strong. Should producer (ex-talking head) Jerry Harrison commit the unpardonable sin of smoothing out the band's rough edges on the forthcoming album. Fans will be abble to point to this collection as an exemple of what the Von Bondies really sound like.

Washington Citynewspaper
by Shannon Zimmerman
Provided neo-garage doesn't get shunted aside in favor of discofied pop-metal -a distinct possibility, by the way, now that Electric Six have bluffed their way onto the Charlie's Angels : Full Throttle sountrack- The Von Bondies should should soon be megastars. Like fellow Detroiters and occasional tourmates the White Stripes, the Von Bondies have racked up reams of critical hosannas thanks to a style of blues-inflected rock so elemental a child could master it-provided, of course, his mom had been blasting the Nuggets series at top volume back when he was still safety enconced in her womb. The prototypical Von Bondiesnumber -murky, feral, and positively oozing with sex- gives new musical meaning to the world "primordial".
Unlike the White Stripes, though, the Von Bondies don't buy the idea that rock'n'roll is a form of hero worship. If jack White plays guitar and sings as if he were auditioning for the part of Johnny B. Goode, lead Bondie Jason Stollsteimer is more the kill-yr-idols type. On the evidence of his band's output so far, it appears that the guy yhinks such blues maetros as Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters had about three good ideas total-and that Nuggets luminaries such as Love and the Seeds had, at most, two. The Von Bondies mission is to splice' em together and then spark' em to life with a jolt of 77-style cacophony. If the whole thing blows up in their face, well, so much the better.
In fact, that seems to be precisely the point of the band's new Raw and rare. A collection of live-in-the-BBC studio takes on earlier tunes with a couple of tacked-on live-in-the-rock-club cuts, the album is a tossed-off testament to what two guys (Stollsteimer and and drummer Don Blum) and two gals (guitarist Marcie Bolen and bassist Carrie Smith) can accomplish with just four chords, a fuzzbox or two, and a serious addiction to careering 44 tempos. On the disc-s most illuminating tracks, the Bondies set fire to a handful of tunes from 2001's Lack of communication, lighting them up with a maniacal relentlessness that's not always evident on that Jack White-produced debut of a long-player.
Freed from its studio shackless, "Lack of communication" kick-starts the disc with Smith's throbbing bass, Bolen's clanging guitar and a lumbering three-note riff that Stollsteimer laces through the din like razor wire. And when the man steps to the microphone for the tune's indecipherable first lines, the fun gets fully under way : not since the Cramps' graet Lux Interior perfected his demented punkabilly yelp as a rock'n'rolll frontman managed to sound so simultaneously deranged and in neartotal control. Bad music dor bad poeple, indeed.
Ditto for such deconstructed first album keepers as "Nite Train" -a bone-rattling rock'n'blues that also conjures the Cramps -and "It Came From Japan", two munites and seven seconds of tightly wound chaos driven by thick layers of crusty guitar and the kind of propulsive backbeat that Meg White, bless her candystriped heart, has yet to muster. And even though the twanging "cryin'" and "Soud Of Terror" get the "fast-and-furious" treatment, Lack of Communication's best tuen, "Please Please Man", retains pride of place here. With his band bludgeoning listeners into submission with yet another variation on the 12-bar blues, Stollsteimerbellows a series of increasingly desperate queries : "Do you like the way I walk ?/do you like the way I talk ?/ do you like me at all ?"
Well, yes- at least mostly. Almost by definition, odds & sods collections like Raw and Rare are spotty affairs. And sure enough, the live cuts that close the album, "Unknown" and another take on "It Came From Japan," are definitely of the you-had-to-be-there variety. Just as it did on Lack of Communication "Going Down" makes the Von Bondies' can't-misssonic formula- two parts blues skronk to one part garage-rock grime-just a little too obvious. And while a cover of Jack Yarber's "R & R Nurse" scores points with its raunchy-not-nasty lyrics, the track's insistent bass line comes way too close to "Radar Love" for comfort.
Still, Raw and Rare is further evidence that something weird and wonderful is happening in Detroit Rock City. With Eminem anchoring the town's mass appeal while bands such as Electric Six, the White Stripes, and the Von Bondies vie for hipster-king-pin status, the city's scene calls to mind that of Minneapolis in the mid-80's, when Prince, Hüsker Dü, and the Replacements all had one part or another of the music world in thrall. So here's hoping that particular parallel holds for a least a little while longer : I can't wait to hear the Von Bondies Zen Arcade- to mention Slim Shady's Purple Rain.


THE VON BONDIES: "Raw And Rare"
Dim Mak Records. 15 tracks. 46.45 mins.
...I was staggeringly surprised at just how rock bollockingly good this album is I must have had the volume down too low last time (and this is an album begging to be cranked up past 10). Raw energy is something I have been accustomed to from the US nu-Blues acts in for review but what stands the Von Bondies aside is the clarity of the sound and the strength of the lead singers voice (and this is a live album, released by arrangement with the BBC). They have not let the need for MC5 punk energy diminish the need for a good tune and that's where this bands music is easily distinguished like on stand outs R&R Nurse and Lack Of Communication. Just to complete the experience you also get a few band/song intros from John Peel popping up through the collection nice.
Darren Howells

UNCUT
****
The best band in Detroit at the BBC. Essentially a stopgap import for the US and Japanese market, the bulk of this CD (two smoldering John Peel sessions) nets The VBs wailing and pounding their way through highlights from their 2001 debut Lack of Communication before a studio audience. Bloody marvellous, as are the cheeky tasters for its imminent sequel, like the hypnotic fuzz-guitar vortex "Vacant as a Ghost" and the epic eight minute "Jean Genie" soundalike "Take a Heart". Simon Goddard

PREFIX MAGAZINE
...The introduction to "Lack of Communication," with its simplistic rock swagger and fuzzed-out guitar, comes across as a mishmash of the Strokes, BRMC and the Stooges, while tracks like "Nite Train" mine the American blues vein. On "It Came From Japan," the group tries to capture the energy and sounds of New York punk, but the execution is weak at best. Call it punk on a respirator. "My Baby's Cryin'" switches gears, highlighting female vocals to a mesmerizing, sex-kitten effect. One of the best tracks on the album, it captures the proto-rock sensibility of 1950s-era guitar slingers, who owed as much to Nashville and surfers as they did to Elvis Presley...

PITCHFORKMEDIA
June 18th, 2003
Rating: 8 out of 10

There is an overabundance of garage rock bands these days dozens upon dozens of Estrus styled fanboys, all imploding digital age stooges caught in a chokehold, threatening to fold in on one other like uninspired origami. At this very moment, somewhere outside the Detroit city line, around a hidden bend, an overcrowded field of garage rockers are a nodding their greasy hair to the cool summer breeze, endlessly enslaved by a 60s mixed metaphor, Camel non filters spoiling the honeysuckle wonderfulness of the atmosphere.

Whenever a genre explodes, begins copulating with itself, and goes to seed all kinds of reckless, it can be a bitch and a half separating the singular wheat from the inbred chaff. If you listened to every third Nick Zinner wannabe in town, you would never make it home to enjoy black coffee and the less co opted strains of your record collection. Sorrow of all sorrows, you might even pass away with D4 on your walkman. Garage rock is the grunge of today, which makes grunge todays hair metal and leaves the new Vince Neil fronted Poison in pretty good striking position to make an ironic comeback by next
Fall. When a trend gets this out of control, I usually nod away, figure the rest of those punk asses can MC5 it out amongst themselves because I am too old to scour local toy stores for the musical equivalent of a Cabbage Patch Kid or Tickle Me Elmo.

I am framing a review of The Von Bondies in this backstory to better point out the Detroit foursomes achievement: of all the garage rock kids I have listened to in the past six months they are my favorite by a mile, and Raw and Rare, the groups live album a teaser to keep folks primed for their upcoming second full length, Pawn Shoppe Heart is fucking spooky ass, grimy rock N roll fun.

Why a live record so early in the game? A fair enough question. But remember this: their Jack White produced debut, 2001s Lack of Communication, sold 20,000 worldwide. That is nothing to sneeze at. This discs fifteen live and prerecorded tracks were taken from two BBC Radio Broadcasts and a performance at the Lager House in the bands hometown (the two US recorded tracks, Unknown and It Came from Japan, are the grubbiest, and the only ones that sound fuzzily live, in that tinny, almost bad way I guess that is the raw of the title?) You get to hear the band tuning up, the crowd making little noises, the between song banter, the songs expanding
into finessed jam territory, and the dank echo of the room. Though the songs here are largely available as studio takes on Lack of Communication, a band like The Von Bondies benefits from such unadorned documentation; in a one take context everything just seems that much more propulsive and urgent.

Throughout this album, these two men and two women sound absolutely joyful, like the musics a curative. There is great boy/girl harmonizing on Please Please Man and Going Down, entire band harmonizing on It Came from Japan, and a manic handclapping barrage on Vacant as a Ghost.
Cryin a slight It Came from Japan B side sung by guitarist Marci Bolen (ex Slumber Party) is made mightier through its pairing with Cryin from Lack of Communication. It shows up twice on this CD, in two slightly different versions one live, one pre-recorded; It Came from Japan is also repeated, the second version a fuzzy Monoshock mess.

Aside from the originals, The Von Bondies also dig groove first into two covers. The eight minute version of 60s staple Take a Heart by English garage visionaries The Sorrows is slinky and dirty, and takes enough patient time and care to warrant its ricocheting guitar piss climax. And the live retooling of the Compulsive Gamblers Rock & Roll Nurse is equally well wrough punch drunk, sex freak gritty in its instrumental dueling.

So why do I give props to The Von Bondies, but not to so many other chumps in the pack? Because instead of rote masturbation to genre tropes, this band blends equal parts Misfits and The Animals into their own distinctive Halloween sound; Jason Stollsteimer (guitar, vocals) writes prime hooks, and the entire band offers boatloads of hardcore flesh and blood energy. Save yourself some time and forget the flabby pretenders, already! I am sure the upcoming Pawn Shoppe Heart will be even stronger (and the new material less familiar), but for now, plop this baby in, howl at the moon, dance until you drop, and pass out in your own whiskey vomit.
Brandon STOSUY

NEUMU

Sometimes, sometimes, I think I am that guy from Adaptation, Charlie Kauffman. Cannot tell you whether it is the one that is written himself into the play or the one that plays the lead. The snake eats itself either way. But that is beside the point. The matter is my mind runs amuck too. Maybe not to the detrimental effect Kauffman reached, but just as he passed up meeting Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) in the elevator, I turned my back on introducing myself to Von Bondies lead singer/guitarist Jason Von Bondie twice. I was
standing right next to him both times. Idiot.

What does this do? Simply perpetuate the hurricane in my head. Do something, stupid. You are pathetic. This has nothing to do with groupie/fan crush flirtation. It has to do with intimidation, with cowardly ducking out of the opportunity to meet someone you admire, with passing up the chance to meet someone who will soon be unreachable. Because the Von Bondies are next. God help me, I know they are next. Their cards are on the table and they got a straight flush.

The more I get lost in their mind blowing, dark and enthralling blues/garage rock, the more I admit I will soon be, reluctantly, sharing them with the rest of the world and kicking myself now and then. With Pawn Shoppe Heart, the follow up long player to their 2001 debut album Lack of Communication, on the way, thank the Lord, they have got a live release to tide us over. The first nine tracks on Raw and Rare are from a 2001 BBC Session, the next four are from a BBC session captured last year, and the remaining two were caught at Detroits Lager House. Through and through, it is intensely hot.

Something unspeakable swells the Von Bondies music full of passion and power. Like the individual who does not say much but when they do, it is meaningful the Detroit foursomes music is simple but huge. Jason wails (in a throaty/vibrato sort of tone) like he is licking your neck or sucking your left lobe, before breaking it down to a deep, breathy narrative delivery or bursting into rockabilly yelps. Guitar riffs ring in a Cramps/surf like tradition, bass lines groove in fucked up psychedelic fashion, and drumbeats build and break perfectly in the background.

With the exception of the records two closing tracks, Unknown and It Came From Japan, the second appearance of the song, the only track other than Cryin repeated on the record whose distorted sounds lie in the distance beneath a cloud of feedback, Raw and Rare does not feel all that different from Lack of Communication. While there is the between song hollers and claps and the slight variations (a shifted lyric here, a missing beat there), the recording quality from the BBC sessions is so high you nearly forget the tracks are live. Given that this is the BBC and this is the Von Bondies who are smoking live this all makes perfect sense. The dark and
gritty Night Train fed intermittently by ah ooos swaggers and thrusts and seems to kick the dirt as if resenting something or someone. Me and my brother are not got no sister Jason sneers. Just a bother at home/ So we got two bottles of Night Train baby/ So now we don't feel alone.

Likely the bands most requested song, It Came From Japan has the best fuzzy, Sabbath inspired riff. You want to grab hold of it for a ride. It serves as the bands anthem as together they chant, We all hail, hail/ From rock and roll/ From behind the glass case. The sluggish and bluesy My Babys Cryin features guitarist Marcie Bolen on lead vocals. R & R Nurse rumbles thunderously along before easing to steady minimized stutters, then bursting into a loud rock N roll onslaught again the suspense of the buildup is spine tingling.

So I shrunk away from my two (and quite likely only) chances to meet Jason Von Bondie. So what. He is human too Susan was just as scared to show herself to Charlie as he was to her. At the core, we are all very much alike all us plants, humans and musicians. And in the end, there is hope to keep us going. But I suppose we do not need that with the Von Bondies we already know their upcoming album is gonna shoot them to the moon anyhow.
Jenny TATONE

THE CRUTCH
The Von Bondies interim album, Raw and Rare, is primarily their BBC Sessions from 2001 and consists mostly of Lack of Communication songs, omitting the couple songs from that session that will appear on their upcoming and long awaited sophomore effort, Pawn Shoppe Heart. However, in their place, the Bondies have added some cuts they did in the Radio One studio, minus the crowd, but plus guests like Phil Boyd from Modey Lemon, who helps out with anguished vocals on the 1965 Sorrows (or The Boys Blue depending on what you read) cover, Take a Heart , and David Viner who does some bruising handclapping on the vibrantly volatile Vacant as a Ghost .
As I have said in the past, this Peel Session may be better than Lack of Communication and it shows what this band can do live when not interrupted by their usual technical problems. Every song has a little more heat behind it popping with energy like lumber in a campground fire. Most notably is their updated version of Cryin , which casts black smoke over the album version and gives a taste of what possibly to expect on Pawn Shoppe Heart a smooth, polished urgency, while bleeding red Soul in the middle of a meaty, charred rock and roll sound that is crusted all around.
Add in Save My Life and you have a call and response shouting match between the men and women that make up The Von Bondies (as well as help from their studio guests) that makes you move : legs, hips, ass : this rock and soul owns you. Another standout outside the Lack of Communication tracklist is the Compulsive Gamblers cover, R & R Nurse , which features Don Blum on vocals, belting out from behind his fatally fierce drumming.
Even though you can find most of these songs on Lack of Communication, Raw and Rare takes it up a nasty notch, passing along one of the best Peel Sessions I have ever heard from anyone and showing why they deserve your attention. If anything, it will hold you over until Pawn Shoppe Heart finally makes it out of the studio and inevitably wears down record needles around the world.
by: Chad Cheatham

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