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If Thee Michelle Gun Elephant were put in a Celebrity Deathmatch ring with any of the bands touted as part of the “garage revival”, I’d put my money on TMGE. (Well, so long as the Hives stay out of it.)

Few bands play garage rock louder and dirtier than Thee Michelle Gun Elephant. Chiba Yusuke’s raspy growl is a love/hate kind of voice — you either love it or you hate it.

As demonstrated on the retrospective TMGE 106 (released as Collection in the U.S.), Thee Michelle Gun Elephant has slowly graduated to bigger studio budgets over the years. Studio sheen is anathema to garage rock’s lo-fi aesthetic.

Not so on Rodeo Tandem Beat Specter, the band’s most recent studio album to be released in the U.S.

The crisper sound loses none of the band’s live immediacy. Chiba and company actually sound stronger.

On the surface, Rodeo Tandem Beat Specter serves up much of the same rough-hewned, headache-inducing rawk ‘n’ roll as previous albums. The quartet could never be accused of “growing” as songwriters.

And yet, there’s something subtly different about Rodeo Tandem Beat Specter.

Maybe it’s the way Chiba makes the songs’ melodies clearer. Perhaps it’s the powerful guitar work of Abe Futoshi. Could be the versatility of drummer Kuhara Kazuyuki. (Spot the almost be-bop drumming on “Citroen no Kodoku” or the tribal beats of “Baby Stardust”.) Or maybe it’s the “Beat Specter” interludes, which show the band can actually play a slow song, let alone an instrumental.

It could be all of those things.

Or it could just be that tracks such as “God Jazz Time”, “Abaraketa Sekai” and “Akage no Kelly” are some of the best songs the band has written within its limited parameters.

Regardless, Rodeo Tandem Beat Specter is the tightest Thee Michelle Gun Elephant album Alive/Total Energy has so far reissued.

I say the following at the risk of raising some ire: Thee Michelle Gun Elephant aren’t the greatest songwriters in the world.

The Japanese garage punk band has built an entire career rehashing with complete earnestness the kind of gritty rock ‘n’ roll music that paved the way to the Sex Pistols and Ramones of the world.

We’re talking stuff like MC5 or the Who or, as most often cited by rock pundits, Blue Cheer. Thee Michelle Gun Elephant don’t indulge in the kind of Pixie-esque atonal melodicism of Number Girl, or the jackhammer, hardcore assault of Bleach.

Nah. Yusuke Chiba and pals love their 1-4-5 progressions. Which isn’t to say Collection is a bad disc. Rather the contrary.

Thee Michelle Gun Elephant do such a great job at capturing that rock ‘n’ roll essence, they can be forgiven for not crafting great songwriting masterpieces.

If anything, Collection demonstrates that a band as loud and as brash as Thee Michelle Gun Elephant can’t be captured accurately on aluminum. This band probably puts on one helluva live show. (TMGE canceled it’s only Austin, Texas appearance at SXSW 1999.)

From start to finish, Collection brings together the best bits from TMGE’s many albums, and while the disc on the whole sounds incredibly homogenous, no one can deny these guys work hard for their cover charges.

“Young Jaguar”, “Hi! China!”, “Smokin’ Billy”, “Black Tambourine”, “The Birdmen” — all great tracks not for having tremendous hooks but for capturing some great, raw energy.

Collection does a great job of keeping listeners interested in a style of garage rock that might otherwise come across as somewhat retread.

This album gives me a headache. And that’s actually a compliment.

Thee Michelle Gun Elephant plays its brand of rock ‘n’ roll really loud and really obnoxious. Play the band’s U.S. debut Gear Blues at any volume, and it’s still too much.

The Japanese quartet’s take on punk owes as much to the 12-bar-blues and surf rock as it does to the Ramones. It’s as if everything between the Beatles and Led Zeppelin never happened.

Call it “crotch rocket rock.” The band wears a lot of leather in the packaging for Gear Blues, and it’s not hard to imagine Harley Davidson devotees blaring this album in their earphones while tearing down the interstate.

From the uniform black to the ultra-cool shades, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant is a lot of attitude. Which is to say Gear Blues does little more than reinvent the wheel.

Vocalist Chiba Yusuke growls, screams and swears his way through Abe Futoshi’s cranked-to-11 garage rock riffs. You probably heard it all before, and you probably heard it better from other bands.

But what Thee Michelle Gun Elephant lacks in originality — a rather overrated concept, at times — they make up for in sheer gumption.

On the surface, tracks such as “Smokin’ Billy” and “G.W.D.” don’t really offer much other than really grungey guitars and choruses delivered in vocal-chord busting screams. But after a while, TMGE’s music becomes hypnotic. It’s simple. It’s guttaral. It’s the perfect soundtrack for letting your hair whip across your face (assuming your hair is long enough to do that.)

Alive/Total Energy calls Gear Blues, which was released in Japan two years ago, a “classic” album. Perhaps. If nothing else, this album is a textbook example of how image and attitude go a long way in the rock ‘n’ roll world. A very long way.