No, they're nothing to do with Dublin's most salubrious postcode - instead D4 are a mean-looking, noisy four-piece from Auckland, currently riding the garage rock bandwagon as hard as they possibly can. With The Strokes and The Hives proving that retro guitar rock still has a future, these raucous young New Zealanders are adamant about wanting a piece of the action. For all their ambition, however, their debut album suggests that D4 are high on ambition, rather low on imagination. The songs on 6Twenty stick fairly closely to the traditional punk template, relying on short bursts of manic guitar and predictably macho histrionics from frontman Jimmy Christmas - with the band's influences rendered glaringly obvious by a hamfisted cover of Johnny Thunders 'Pirate Love'. For the most part, this is reasonably entertaining stuff - but with so many other outfits ploughing the same furrow and a lack of truly memorable songs, you suspect that D4 may ultimately struggle to stand out from the crowd.
