The 1980 Listening Post - Max Demian - The Call of the Wild

 Reviewed by Chris Roberts

Released: 1980 Max Demian The Call Of The Wild Genre: Power Pop Rating: 3 out of 5 Between Herman Hesse, Jack London and George Orwell references, it might seem like you’d need a reading list to digest all of Max Demian’s second album. Good news! You don’t. I’ll give you the Chris Notes version, and you’ll absolutely nail the final. If you really like The Cars, you might like The Call Of The Wild. I like The Cars well enough. I had Heartbeat City on cassette in 9th Grade, and I’ve seen that pool scene in Fast Times At Ridgemont High more than once. Even today, Candy-O was just what I needed, but Call Of The Wild is what I got. Max Demian (that’s the band name, not the name of a member of the band you dummy. That would be confusing! Max Demian is a character from Herman Hesse’s Demian—I know because I have a B.A. in English, so I’m pretty fucking good at searching Wikipedia). Wait, what was I writing about? Oh, Max Demian’s singer, Paul Rose, sounds at least 66% Ocasek. He’s also 33% Ray Davies and 12% Tom Petty, and probably 5-10% assorted other sounds, including a howler monkey (I don’t know if that’s right, because I was an English major, not a biology major.) There’s also quite a bit of zip-zap blip-blop pew-pew in the keyboards. And hand claps. Jesus Christ, there are hand claps everywhere. And hooks. Maybe too many hooks since I listened to the album twice. What is this album about? It seems Max Demian heard some Devo or Kraftwerk or Flock of Seagulls (time travel exists you trolls) and said, “Hell, we can do that but way better, so it rocks like Sweet, or T. Rex or ELO! Or The Cars! And we’ll make it about how everyone out there is just a bunch of suckers being programmed, like robots or computers!” They didn’t know that in the future, we’d have robots and computers who would do all the writing for us, so we could just sit around all weekend listening to our flip-flops, can-cans and zip-ups.