I woke up today and, instead of immediately going back to sleep, like I usually do, I pressed play on my stereo. And listened to Thee Michelle Gun Elephant. What's so cool about this band? Is it just that they're Japanese? Well, let me tell you, that helps a lot. I can read their lyrics in another writing system and study Japanese while rocking out. I can ponder the juxtaposition of two very different cultures. I can take great joy at their photographs, which are always high quality, frequently black and white, featuring four scowling Japanese gents in various silly/awesome costumes.

Is it their music? Well, that helps a lot too. It has a lot of integrity. They essentially play garage rock, which is a troubled genre. It’s close to blues rock, and like that genre, it has no room for bad ideas. Garage rock either sounds fantastic or like a bad self-parody. If the band slows it down just a little, they become heavy metal. If the lyrics veer the slightest bit toward misogyny or unpoetic boasting or celebrations of drunkenness, again, it becomes heavy metal. The guitar solos are either spot-on awesome, or else they're just bad (they can be bad in various ways: meandering, overly cocky, untuneful, unrhythmic, or just uninteresting). Too much noodling and it becomes a jam band. The singer has a range of possibilities, but he must not screech, constantly yell, have too big of an ego, or be overly simple melodically; or else it becomes, respectively, glam metal (see: The Datsuns), heavy metal (see: Poison), heavy metal (see: Guns ‘N Roses), or The Von Bondies (see: The Von Bondies).

Now, TMGE are well within the range of great garage rock. The kind that makes me jump up and dance and say, “shit, yes.” Early Who; mid-period Stones; The New York Dolls (some of it, anyway); The White Stripes (particularly on songs like "Astro", "Hypnotize", "Now Mary"); the best Oasis (“Fade Away” is a great example. It’s one of the most compulsively listenable songs in my collection, right up there with “Tom Courtenay”, “Electricity”, “100,000 Fireflies”, “Going Out West”, and “Debaser”); the occasional Velvet Underground song that pulled out all the stops (“White Light/White Heat”, “What Goes On”, “Beginning to See the Light”, “I’m Waiting for the Man”, “Head Held High”. The songs where they said, “Who cares about melody? Find some chords and play the shit out of them!”); Extended Forefinger (hell yeah, mutha). Now, you may have noticed: there are no unadulterated garage rock bands on this list. A band that plays pure garage rock generally gets bored and branches out; or else they suck; or else, yes, they are inspired. Now, I’m not going to say that TMGE are inspired. Let’s just say they haven’t gotten bored (as Scott likes to say, they rock as if their lives depend on it), and they sure as hell don’t suck. Generally their songs are right where garage rock ought to be, and they sound really good, if not inspired.

So what makes them so cool? Is it the bizarre lyrics (which include the occasional English phrase like “oasis’s ice” and “black tambourine” and “the redhead Kelly”)? Could it be the album packaging (probably not. It’s mainly a lot of murky nature pictures, and the band pictures that I’ve already described). Surely it can’t be that no one’s heard of them, because that’s just not logical.

No. It’s none of those reasons. Why are they so cool? They’re so cool because they’re called Thee Michelle Gun Elephant. Next question.