10.03.12
Party like it’s 2003 (But probably not)
“She Just a Girl, Eddie,” the only tune I like enough to play more than twice on the new Darkness album, Hot Cakes. Call it a descendant of the “magnificently silly love songs” the band used to do but which are now mostly absent. (Plus it’s a tune you just can’t pull off in small clubs any more than Starz could make “Cherry Baby” work live the way it was recorded in ’77. Check the YouTube tour footage for “Eddie” if ya don’t believe me. Just not quite the same thing.)
Mixed by Toronto Bob Ezrin, famous in the Seventies for giving us Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd, among a lot of other stuff, the album is C+/B- high impact but poppy hard rock.
I liked the debut in 2003, Permission to Land.
Nine years is a span. The songwriting isn’t quite up to it, anymore, except for the excerpted tune and a ballad, “Living Each Day Blind.”
The rest is raise-your-fist-and-yell-then-flick-the-lighters-on-the-last song arena rock. It’s tight, busy and perfect sounding but not as memorable as it needs to be except for the amazing voice of Justin Hawkins. Which he works overtime, spoiled by the fact that almost all anyone will recall is that he lets out a gratuitous falsetto shriek about all the guys who wanted to suck his cock back in the day on the initial tune.
That’s a move, or glam rock tableau, good for automatic entry into the Fool’s Hall of Fame in 2012. Why didn’t Toronto Bob say to ’em, “Boys, I’m going to save ya hilarity, which you’ll be the object of, on this one, trust me,” and just bury it?
Without a miracle it won’t get to half a million copies, which is what Permission to Land did here in 2003.
Even “She’s Just a Girl, Eddie” is more complicated than it has to be. Lotsa stuff in it which could be thrown out and the horse would still trot.