Remember The Darkness? Spandex, 2003, I Believe in a Thing Called Love, Love is Only a Feeling, and a sophomore album that nobody liked or bought (despite Kerrang! magazine breathing one of their few remaining gasps of sanity and awarding the album their highest score)?
No?
Well, now's an excellent chance to either re-aquaint yourself with them or roll over and take their special brew of brilliantly silly carrying of the sacred rock n' roll torch.
As rock finds itself in arguably its weirdest state yet, album number four crashes down through the ceiling. Sequinned boots kick in all directions as the glammy force of the band's favourite form of gloriously OTT rock n' roll cheerfully bash your skull in (and out, like a hokey-cokey with Marshall Amps sponsorship).
Where thank-god-they're-back previous disc, Hot Cakes, had more of a lairy feelgood, um, feel to it, Last of Our Kind appears to wear brass knuckles underneath the velvet gloves. Witness the one-two punch of the first two tracks, Barbarian and Open Fire, notably uptempo shitkickers that carry a slight snarl with the expected snigger.
Handclapping anthems sway to the tempo alongside supercharged slices of rifferama, and suddenly the prospect of there being a dimension not containing this band is enough to scare you into grabbing a ticket for their winter 2015 UK trek, for at least one more chance to partake in the time-honoured Darkness party.
On other fronts, The Darkness continue to wear their rival-beating talents on their nipple tassels. Justin Hawkin's inimitable force-of-nature wail is present and deliciously unapologetic, delivering their amusingly inventive lyrical games with the expected alacrity. In a musical landscape oversaturated with unpalatable identikit bores, it is all too easy to
However, having worked so hard to develop their own take-no-prisoners identity and zippily identifiable character, along with a songwriting nous that has set the bar giddily high for themselves (not to mention their catastrophically underrated second album), some tracks, perhaps inevitably, can't quite reach up to those heights.
It's an issue that permeated previous long-player Hot Cakes, a thoroughly solid romp that couldn't quite match the pure greatness achieved prior. Taken as a standard rock album, however, it was by no means without identifiable merit.
Whether Last of Our Kind can be deemed a victim of the same problem can only be determined with 999 more listens and the fullness of time. What can be immediately ascertained, however, is that it is another secured victory.
7/10
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