The Darkness - Pinewood Smile

The Darkness
Pinewood Smile
2017
Spotify

Since their previous album Last of Our Kind The Darkness have added some rock royalty behind the drums. Rufus Tyler Taylor son of Queen's Roger Taylor has taken over on the sticks and really does infuse some new excitement into the band not to mention some really great drumming. Bombastic, sarcastic, infantile, fun, innapropriate are all words that can be used to describe damn near and Darkness song. Nothing has really changed with the band's sound on this record, but honestly why would you want it to? This sort of music, done this way really doesn't exist anymore. AC/DC, Queen and yes Spinal Tap are all major influences and that history comes through. I've seen The Darkness a couple times, both in singer Justin Hawkins' fully addicted days and sober as well. You can sense the excitement in him now being sober, the energy of the band is back to being bright and fun rather than spiraling into rock oblivion and that is where they belong. The Darkness are in a way tongue in cheek and when they forgot that about themselves is where they really faltered. Yet that desire seems to be gone, The Darkness now are much more focused on making music that they love and it translates. Production is provided by Adrian Bushby who produced The Foo Fighters' Echoes, Silence & Grace as well as Muse's Resistance. You'll notice some similar production on this record as compared to the Foo, but The Darkness push things further down the Rock and Roll road than the Foo are willing to go.

With song titles like "Japanese Prisoner of Love" and "Buccaneers of Hispaniola" you can tell that the band are willing to be as weird as possible, but it simply works so well. The singles "Solid Gold" and "All the Pretty Girls" are great but the album really is missing a song with a huge hook that you can't get out of your head, though "I Wish I Was in Heaven" has a really really great chorus and a guitar solo that is incredibly fun. The lyrics on "Happiness" are absolutely ridiculous, bright, sunny and fun which you would not expect from The Darkness and also makes it so fun. Who doesn't want to scream "Happiness... It is the best..." at the top of their lungs? I know I've mentioned guitar solos to many times at this point, and I usually really hate them, but "Happiness" delivers yet another great one and ends with some seaside sounds just to round out the good vibes. The album closes on "Stampede of Love" which is the real problem on the whole album. They are clearly trying to harness Spinal Tap's "Big Bottom" or Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls" with a song for women of size, but where Queen and Spinal Tap's songs were celebratory and congratulatory "Stampede of Love" just feels kinda mean. When paired with a lighter almost folk acoustic sound it just feels... kinda icky. However the other songs are still quite fun and The Darkness continue to do what they do yet again, and we're lucky they keep on doing it.

7.8 out of 10