The debut album by Scottish trio the Fratellis poses many questions, none of them pressing. What if the Arctic Monkeys didn't care about street cred and signed to a major instead of trying to keep it real on Domino? What if Pete Doherty spent less time doing crack and more time getting high on the fact that he gets to have sex with Kate Moss? What if Louis XIV weren't quite as terrible as you correctly remembered them to be? And, in the pantheon of iPod pitchmen bands, will the Fratellis be the next Jet or just the next Caesars?
Costello Music makes the search for these answers an intermittently rewarding if ultimately inconsequential task. Though fond of the double-timed rave-ups and streetlight serenades that form the genetic code for post-Libertines, UK guitar-rock bands, the faux-fraternal Fratellis aren't so much the sound of young Britain as the sound of dad's old record collection. Cataloging a lover's spat on "For the Girl", frontman Jon Fratelli explains she "she was into the Stones, I was into the Roses," but his band's traditionalist pub rock makes you wonder why the girl's preference for the geezers would be such a thorny issue. In pop pin-up terms, the Fratellis are the Slade to Pete Doherty's Bowie-- artless but amiable lunkheads with a knack for sloshed choruses and making cheap jokes out of bad spelling ("Cuntry Boys & City Girls"). Though 98% of their songs are about getting/losing girls, the Fratellis are more like horny but harmless schoolboys than dirtbag lotharios, more mischievous than malicious.
The best songs here are front-loaded: The platform-booted glam stomp of "Chelsea Dagger", the obligatory Ray Davies-styled strummer ("Whistle for the Choir"), and if the iPod-commercial overload of "Flathead" makes you want to ba-da-ba-ba-da-bash your TV set with a baseball bat, at least stick around for the part you don't hear in the advert, when Jon suddenly turns into Jerry Garcia for the trippy outro guitar solo. But the Fratellis are a decent singles band working overtime here-- though no song breaks the four-minute mark, there's still 13 of them to wade through, and most are beholden to a predictable pattern of hop-along verse and overexcited amped-up chorus, while the attempts to toughen up their eager-to-please power-pop with bluesy prowls ("Doginabag") and hoarse-throat punky aggression ("Got Ma Nuts From a Hippy") are far less engaging.
Costello Music's passable hit/miss ratio isn't enough to suggest the Fratellis can usurp the Monkeys or, heck, even the View as Britain's consummate people's band, but for about 12 minutes here they corner an oversaturated market for good-time, no-worries, low-calorie rock'n'roll meant to be blasted in cramped, smoky environments where people still play darts. After all, it's no coincidence this band's shorthand is the Frats, right?
