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.