Label: Cooking Vinyl
Release date: October 4, 2019
Production: Dan Hawkins
Album length: 38.58 min.
Genre: Hard Rock
Rating: 9.0 / 10
Who would have thought that a band, sixteen years after an instant commercial breakthrough, one that came in 2003 when nobody was listening to rock’n’roll anymore, with a debut studio album no less, would not only survive and hold its ground, but keep widening its reach, updating the old-school staples of rock and roll for a new era? And all the while it has stayed mildly excessive yet thoroughly credible, teasing us with its grimacing parody and its inexhaustible, wildly funny goofing around!
The Darkness and their new, once again tremendously strong studio album “Easter Is Cancelled” deliver exactly what’s demanded and expected of The Darkness. No, there are no venomously potent hits on it like I Believe In A Thing Called Love, but in just under 39 minutes of “classic” The Darkness “comedy”, the album thrills from start to finish. It’s incredible, really, that a band with relatively little room left to maneuver inside its own creative mold, after everything it has said and shown, can still pleasantly surprise us. And every single track on the new album will still raise your eyebrows to great effect, which means The Darkness keep their charisma of cutting rock’n’roll parody intact and unsullied.
Anyone who has followed The Darkness from the very beginning will quickly get on the same wavelength with the substance of the new album. With it, The Darkness keep up the pose of a gang of rascals, eternally unmanageable jokers who can’t wait to “dunk” one of the classic rock’n’roll (and metal) bands in parody. And they remain absolutely triumphant at it, because in doing so they also hold on, with plenty of credibility, to one of their trademarks, a recognizable musical recipe.
The Darkness have always liked to sprinkle in folk rock elements, or, more precisely, motifs of Celtic-sounding musicality. The opener Rock N’ Roll Deserves To Die is a perfect example. The intro is timid and Celtic-sounding, then it’s suddenly “sliced” open by a fat, dirty, roaring Gibson LP guitar riff that bursts into the song. According to the band, it’s about a feeling of desperate fed-upness with the fact that rock’n’roll has turned into a proper clichéd uniform over the years, and that this cliché therefore has to be “killed”, “smashed”, “banished”. The chorus, right at its core, takes a Queen-style turn (a classic trick of Justin Hawkins). Through the modulations of skillful songwriting, the track keeps the tension high along its main thread and plays out as a proper bombastic drama theater. Interestingly, the album’s ending is formatted quite similarly in the closing We Are The Guitar Men, but there, unlike the urge to destroy rock’n’roll, the band shouts “long live rock’n’roll” (the outro is done in the style of Eddie Van Halen tapping. The rest of the album is musically invasive. Above all, the unpolished, unbreakable punch of the riffs, riding on classic rock throughout, coexists brilliantly with the epically bombastic catchiness of the chorus melodies, as captured in How Can I Loose Your Love and, right after it, in Live Till’ I Die, which starts out like a ride through The Who-style figures. The album’s arena-sized, bombastic hookiness swells in the anthemic Heart Explodes, which has Thin Lizzy twin harmonies woven into it. Deck Chair calms the album down and is composed under the complete influence of Hawkins’ teenage Queen listening. The title track then cleaves the album in half, a metalized beast of a song that sounds like Iron Maiden on steroids. Heavy Metal Lover opens in the dangerous manner of the Steppenwolf hit Born To Be Wild, but it only opens. Cowbell added. The verse fuses a calm passage with a raging one, which spills over into yet another unbelievably infectious chorus melody. Choke On It is the darkest moment on the album, comparable to the punk eccentricity of the late seventies. At the same time it carries a catchy rock rhythmic bounce. With the associations I’ve tossed out, The Darkness tease just enough and never give you the feeling they’re copying, only a constant, cheeky but endearing mockery.
Justin screams extremely high. The fifth octave is cleared with ease. In the melodies he once again evokes the classic moves of Queen (the pompous stacking of vocal harmonies in the background of the melodies also calls up that association), which is hardly a new observation. The man has once again delivered excellent soloing in the mid-eight passages. The songs have proper heads and tails, and in songwriting The Darkness remain true masters of recycling, which means they can sell the same old feint in fresh, juicy packaging again and again, because it’s guaranteed to “bite” and ignite again and again. Effective. It’s clear that the new songs will fit perfectly into the iron-clad repertoire of their future live shows.
“Easter is Cancelled” doesn’t give off quite as bristling a feel as its wildly unrestrained predecessor “Pinewood Smile”, but it appeals with greater musical attractiveness and invasive infectiousness, and the bombastic element grows in it too. The cover goes hand in hand with the band’s pose. It provokes, and so successfully that quite a few media outlets refused to give media support tied to the promotion of the new The Darkness album. The crucified Jesus with the build of Arnold Schwarzenegger is none other than Justin, and the other three buddies are drawn as Mary Magdalene and two more female companions (the “curly one with glasses” (Frankie) can’t be helped by any cosmetic surgery), who, next to the crucified Justin, mercilessly slaughter the Romans.
So The Darkness have cancelled Easter. In their usual style of inexhaustible, dandyish rascals who never run short of inspiration for ingeniously slipping in dark humor. With this album, Rock ‘N’ Roll got yet another proper affirmation of its mission. “Easter Is Cancelled” delivers a truly genuine party in every way. Exactly what the basic message of the magic called rock’n’roll is all about. Long before Christmas, which The Darkness have moved with the new album to Friday, October 4, 2019, and, like we said, they cancelled Easter without a shred of respect!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
01. Rock And Roll Deserves To Die
02. How Can I Lose Your Love
03. Live ‘Til I Die
04. Heart Explodes
05. Deck Chair
06. Easter Is Cancelled
07. Heavy Metal Lover
08. In Another Life
09. Choke On It
10. We Are The Guitar Men
Lineup:
Justin Hawkins – vocals, keyboards, guitar
Dan Hawkins – guitar
Frankie Poullain – bass
Rufus Tiger Taylor – drums
