It's a paradox: In order to take the Darkness seriously, you have to be willing to take a joke. Justin Hawkins is an award-winning songwriter who can layer guitars like Boston’s Tom Scholz and shatter glass like Ronnie James Dio. And yet, he has come off like both a rock god and a regular schlub putting on his unitard one leg at a time—making campy, funny hard rock that never tipped over into parody during their inevitably brief commercial peak in 2000. As a result, they’ve parlayed a kickass debut and one major hit in America into a Super Bowl commercial and opening gigs for Lady Gaga and Guns N’ Roses. As 2015’s Last of Our Kind made clear, the anachronism of the Darkness justifies their existence. All they have to do is show up.
But with Pinewood Smile, the joke is taken more seriously than ever. And all that’s left is the cynic’s view of the Darkness as some comedy-rocker combination of Russell Brand joining Tenacious D to front Steel Panther. Hell, there’s a simpering power ballad called “Happiness” that invokes D’s own “Friendship Test,” whereas “Solid Gold” (as in, “shitting out…”) takes its clueless A&R clichés from the flim Get Him to the Greek. While that era of absurdist, winking slapstick was often viewed as clever or even subversive in its time, it’s depressing to see, in retrospect, how many of the jokes were just outward projections of hetero male paranoia. The Darkness follow suit, a subtle and sad shift from their prior skewering of trouser-stuffing machismo.
Given that he sings from the perspective of a pirate earlier on Pinewood Smile, one can't doubt Hawkins' willingness to be out of his depth. But “Japanese Prisoner of Love” reduces “sensual deprivations/human rights violations” to group showers and the indignity of being “taken by force from behind by a stabby white supremacist named Klaus.” At best, it’s failed role-playing, but Pinewood Smile’s unexpected mean streak becomes indefensible on “Stampede of Love.” It’s not inexplicable—as two of the Darkness’ spiritual forefathers were responsible for “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Big Bottom”—but “Stampede” is more in the spirit of Shallow Hal as a full-length “no fat chicks” joke that doesn’t even try to half-ass a moral lesson about body acceptance. And it’s the closer, so Pinewood Smile ends with, “across the sand on a donkey ride/great fun till the donkey died” followed by 30 seconds of silence.
Hawkins has been singing about himself as a has-been almost from the start. And if he was to totally break kayfabe, there’s a compelling story to be told about how a band like the Darkness keeps on keepin’ on when they actually decline—when the advances shrivel up and the tour rider isn’t picking out the green M&M’s. “A moment in the sun/A lifetime in the shade/A year full of glory and an empty decade,” Hawkins shrieks on “I Wish I Was in Heaven”—fatalistic, gallows humor that could’ve fit on an Elliott Smith record and still be the most depressing track. But, as ever, the Darkness will not take the risk of full transparency, and Pinewood Smile does what all Darkness songs do. With their love of magnifico harmonies, hair metal iconography, fluency in dork culture, and pop proficiency, the Darkness still have more in common with Weezer than Queen.
But as with Weezer, the Darkness now operate in a vacuum that suffocates anyone who’s checked out over the past decade. They nearly function as live-action fan-fic. And most often, songs live or die based not on their hooks, arrangements, and certainly not on their emotional impact, but on premise alone. There are four additional tracks on the Deluxe edition, each more self-explanatory than the one before it: “Seagulls (Losing My Virginity)”, “Rack of Glam,” “Rock in Space,” and “Uniball.” Meanwhile, “Buccaneers of Hispaniola” exists for the sole purpose of Hawkins’ shrieking the title. The Darkness once proved fully capable of writing songs that transcended the gimmick and spoke the universal language of pop. Whether or not these songs merit repeat listens depends on how much mileage the listener gets from acknowledging the dissonance of Hawkins making operatic metal songs about the shittiness of Britain’s railway system.
It’s tempting to give Pinewood Smile a pass in light of the Darkness’ marginal place in the pop culture discussion. Compared to infinitely more problematic and popular acts, Pinewood Smile feels more like of an off-color Facebook post or a cringey group text from an uncle who generally means well but has mostly opted out of evolving with broader cultural norms. No one expects woke-ness from the Darkness, but their reliance on making jokes at someone else’s expense complicates, if not completely negates, their appeal of evoking a bygone era of tighter pants and looser morals. Pinewood Smile has got more jokes than ever, and it’s the first time the Darkness don’t evoke 1974 or 1984 so much as 2003—and they’ve never sounded more dated.
