The Empress Strikes Back

By Benjamin Nugent

The story leading up to the British rock band Elastica's new album, The Menace (Atlantic), plays like an episode of VH1's Behind the Music. In 1995, Elastica's self-titled debut CD topped the British charts with a caustic but catchy blend of late '70s new wave and '90s pop. Front woman Justine Frischmann's romantic relationship with Damon Albarn, the lead singer for the Britpop band Blur, attracted even more attention in the British press. Then Elastica's single Connection became a big hit in the U.S., and the album eventually sold a million copies worldwide.

Whereupon the band discovered--you guessed it--that fame was more than it could handle. Says Frischmann: "The punk-rock ethos we started with got watered down." There were touring difficulties. "I think the final straw for me," says drummer Justin Welch, "was when we had just finished Australia, and I arrived home at Heathrow airport with my sandals on and it was snowing outside. That's when I decided we needed a break." There were personnel problems. Bass player Annie Holland, whom Frischmann describes as "the most punk rock of the lot of us," quit the group during the Lollapalooza tour in '95. There were legal hassles. The publishers of the new-wave band Wire claimed the riff in Connection was lifted from Wire's late-'70s song Three Girl Rumba and threatened a lawsuit (the affair was settled out of court). And there were the usual rock woes. Rumors spread that Frischmann was addicted to heroin and that Albarn was jealous because his girlfriend's band was having more success than his own.

In 1996, just after keyboardist Dave Bush joined the group, Elastica stopped playing together. "It just felt more graceful to bow out of the competition," says Frischmann, now 30. She refuses to speak about the impact of drugs on this period of her life. When Frischmann and Albarn separated in 1998, Albarn made their breakup the theme of Blur's 1999 album, 13, and Frischmann became known more as her ex-lover's troubled muse than as an artist in her own right.

Now with The Menace due to hit U.S. stores this week, Elastica and its leader are trying to stage a comeback, complete with a tour of America in September. Last year Frischmann and Welch coaxed Holland back into the band ("She was itching to get back in," says Welch), drafted two new members (guitarist Paul Jones and a second keyboardist, who goes by the single name of Mew) and pounded out the new album in six weeks in the fall.

The old Elastica took a less-is-more approach to its music, making every bass and guitar line distinct. Now the band frequently sounds like six musicians crammed into a small apartment and competing to be heard. The result is a more insolent, perhaps an even more youthful sound. The Menace is the work of people who have gone a little stir crazy. In rock 'n' roll, that's a good thing.

The album's title refers to the band itself, says Frischmann, which she hopes is "getting up people's noses and reminding the kids that there is another way of life, that you don't have to be Britney Spears. Trying to get 16-year-old girls to pick up guitars instead of hot pants." She pauses and reconsiders. "Or guitars and hot pants."

Yet Frischmann's songs are less lighthearted than they were five years ago. On Car Song, a cut off the first album, she sang, "In every little Honda/ There may lurk a Peter Fonda." Now when she sings, "Baby put your arms around me/ Aren't you glad that you have found me?" on the cacophonous Generator, she sounds like she knows what it is to feel undesirable. Elastica 2000 may not be as witty as Elastica 1995, but Frischmann's new vulnerability is winning enough to fend off VH1 has-been status for at least another five years.