Better Things: Chainsaw (Denn Die Toten Reiten Schnell)

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

Power pop is great when it works well - fun and bouncy and energetic. It can sometimes tend to the synthetic or the saccharine, but the best power pop leans into both of those words, to find ways to be loud/brash while still being zippy/accessible. 

I was going to say that the Deathray Davies were really good at that, but, working on this post, I see they had a record as recently as 2021 (after a hiatus after 2005's The Kick and the Snare), so I should instead say they are really good at that. I haven't heard that new record, and I'm not sure I dug all the way back to the early indy end of their career, either, but the middle period is full of great songs like Is This On? and The Fall Fashions and Plan to Stay Awake.

The song I loved best - my kids, too; we played this a lot in the late Aughts and early teens when they were energetic ruffians - was Chainsaw (Denn Die Toten Reiten Schnell). It's from Kick and the Snare, which I thought at the time was the Davies' best record, so I was hoping they'd go on to do more in that vein over the next few years. (Life continually disappoints me; that's what makes it life.)

I don't quite get the subtitle - it's from Bram Stoker's Dracula, as a quote from the German poet Gottfried August Bürger, and means, more or less "For the dead travel fast" - but it's Germanic and forbidding and scary-sounding, which is just right for a song that's just a catalog of ways the singer could commit acts of mayhem on the listener.

I got a chainsaw at the pawn shop
It looks real nice, chop chop chop 

There's no deep meaning here: this is a song of threats. Probably half-joking, over-the-top, not-meant-to-be-taken-serious threats, sure. But threats none the same. And it's got a killer guitar drone and propulsive beat behind that.

This is yet another great song to have playing in the car as you head out to do whatever.

I'm coming for you.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 1, 2025

I ordered a bunch of used books, from various sellers, through ABE Books not that long ago, and they've ben dribbling in over the past week. I haven't checked my original order, but I think everything has now arrived. (If not, I'll have a happy surprise later; I like to leave room for happy surprises.)

Leave It to Psmith, a 1923 novel by P.G. Wodehouse, and, as I remember it, possibly his first really top-rank book. (Not that some of his earlier stuff isn't quite good; it is.) I'm pretty sure I've read this before, but I've never covered it on this blog, and any copy I had disappeared in my 2011 flood - so it's time to read it again, I think.

My Man Jeeves is also an early Wodehouse book, a 1919 collection that I read in 2008. It collects some Jeeves and some Reggie Pepper stories, and I'm pretty sure it's entirely separate from the much later collection Enter Jeeves, which also has some early Jeeves and Reggie Pepper stories. (My sense is that Enter was the stuff that wasn't published in book form at the time, and collected decades later once the copyrights had expired. But I will see.) 

The Mating Season - you may see a theme here - is a 1949 Wodehouse novel about Bertie Wooster. I know I read it, but I think that was in my first burst of Wodehouse-reading back in the '90s (when I read all of the Jeeves & Bertie books, most if not all of Blandings, and a few other things).

And the last of the Wodehouse books in this bunch - I'm trying to collect all of the Overlook series, and am now mostly buying ones I had copies of and lost in my 2011 flood - is Carry On, Jeeves, which is not a mildly racy '70s movie, though that would be an interesting collision of British humor. Instead, it's another early collection of stories, this one from 1925.

Then there's a Library of America Mark Twain book - the only one I didn't have, though again I think I did have it, before the flood - The Innocents Abroad & Roughing It. I've been thinking I want to re-read Roughing It for the past year or so, and realized I didn't have a copy in the house, which made that difficult. But now I do.

Lulu in Hollywood is, I think, one of the classic books old-time Hollywood, by the silent actress Louise Brooks. I've had it on lists of books to read someday, but I don't think I ever came across a copy in person, even in years of wandering through bookstores. So I finally just ordered a copy, in the fairly recent (2000, which is new for someone whose career was in the '20s and who died in 1985) University of Minnesota edition. Looking at it now, I see it is not a single narrative, but eight essays and an epilogue - puckishly titled "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs" - that originally appeared in film magazines in the '60s and '70s, with what looks like a long and bloviating introduction by Kenneth Tynan.

And last is the book that actually sparked this buying spree: The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, by the folks who made that show in the '90s. I had a copy of this Bantam trade paperback - once again, before the flood - and had half-forgotten that it came out in the hiatus between the Comedy Central and Sci-Fi Channel eras of the show, so it only covers the first six seasons in depth, with the movie teased (I think this was published as part of the run-up to the movie) and Season Seven covered quickly on one page at the end. The copy I got now is a bit battered, with a lot of spine roll and warping, so I'll probably have to shove it under some dictionaries and hope I can flatten it back out.

Quote of the Week: Winning Celebrations

The partisans at the Sheraton-Charles were predominantly scrubbed, well dressed and earnest, with the look of the dilettante in politics who feels he or she is doing a civic duty. Some of the women, steadying their nerves with whiskey, were already a trifle high. It was the kind of group that seldom has a winner, politics being what they are, and that is almost as astonished as pleased when it gets one.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana, p.358 in The Sweet Science and Other Writings