The Darkness - One Way Ticket to Hell…And Back

The Darkness return with an eye on rock’n’roll royalty. Who can blame them? Permission to Land had all the earmarks of 70’s and 80’s rock excess, right down to the cocaine abuse, liberal use of the f-bomb, and masturbatory self-indulgence. Having made all that big hair bravado hip again, and with former Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker at the helm, they seemed perfectly poised to continue that climb into the rarefied air (and octaves) of the glam rock greats. It’s a little disappointing then that, even with the addition of a sitar, pan flute, bagpipes, and a full orchestra, their follow-up album comes off as a little tame. By no means is One Way Ticket To Hell…and Back a bad album; it’s actually pretty good, featuring nifty hooks, flamboyant riffs, and (naturally) ample opportunity for air-guitar and falsetto theatrics. It simply lacks the all-out, balls-to-the-wall swagger that made their debut such a rip. They tread cautiously over territory already well traveled by the likes of T-Rex and Queen instead of jubilantly dancing over it. Its beginning is promising enough, opening with the title track, a cocaine caveat whose instrumental extravagance and bawdy humor have the band pretty much picking up where they left off. The aptly named “Knockers,” “Is It Just Me?” and "Bald" follow suit, and the band puts the orchestra to good use in “It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time” and “Blind Man,” both touching ballads about lost loves and mortality, though even here, as elsewhere, their harmonizing is remarkably reminiscent of (surprise!) Freddie Mercury and company. But songs like “Dinner Lady Arms,” “Hazel Eyes,” "English Country Garden," and “Girlfriend” fall frustratingly short. The first is pedestrian, pure and simple, its clumsy attempts at wit lost in trundling melody, and "Hazel Eyes," which attempts to infuse a bit of the Highlands into the band's retro-rock by adding bagpipes, aims for quaintly archaic and ends up just awkward. "English Country Garden," another piece that wears its Queen influence on its sleeve, is flowery to a fault, its lyrically overburdened arrangements topped by frontman Justin Hawkins' repeated screams of "Jardin!" at the end of every chorus. And "Girlfriend"... well, "Girlfriend" is straight-up schmaltz. It's so loaded down with cliches there's no room left for anything remotely original. More than anything, these songs betray just what a bitch expectation can be, as if they were written with one eye trained on their critics and the other on their audience. Biblically speaking, overreaching ambition (and the pride that spawns it) is one of the surest tickets to the netherworld out there, and The Darkness are certainly guilty of it on One Way Ticket To Hell. But we’re talking music here, not morality, and for entertainers, there are far more damning vices to be had than a little hubris. As for its artistic counterparts, mediocrity and complacency come most readily to mind, and those, like it or not, are sins you can't hang on them. [www.thedarknessrock.com]