If grunge was supposed to have killed off hair metal, it did a crap job of it. Nirvana and Pearl Jam somehow begat Creed and Nickelback, who demonstrated how truly boring rock music could get when stripped of glamor, fretboard wizardry, and glass-shattering falsettos. While the Strokes and the White Stripes were instantly deified by music critics for bringing a certain looseness and swagger back to rock'n'roll at the dawn of the 2000s, the Darkness arrived on their coattails embodying what the masses really want from their rock bands: glitz over grit, anthemic joy over disaffected cool, unitards over skinny jeans.
A mega-selling sensation back home in UK, the Darkness' 2003 debut Permission to Land was a more modest phenomenon in America, cracking the Billboard Top 40 and selling 500,000-plus copies. And even if their ingeniously titled 2005 follow-up, One Way Ticket to Hell… And Back, failed to make as great an impact on either side of the pond-- leading in part to an unceremonious breakup and, more lamentably, Hot Leg-- the Darkness were very much a harbinger of how rock'n'roll would be recycled/revived in pop culture through the decade: Guitar Hero, Rock of Ages, Tony Soprano enjoying possibly his last meal to the sound of "Don't Stop Believin'".
So when Samsung needed a dormant early-2000s rock band to star in their Galaxy Note Super Bowl ad last February, they sure as hell didn't go for the Vines. Coming in the wake of a 2011 UK reunion tour, that commercial-- featuring newly moustached but ever-bare-chested lead shrieker Justin Hawkins-- served as a suitably shameless American reintroduction to a proudly shameless band, and a good chunk of the viewing audience could be forgiven for thinking the ad was another example of a one-hit wonder shilling their old song to pay new bills. But despite exploiting all means necessary to stage their comeback, the Darkness are actually more interested in selling records than tablets: Hot Cakes marks the return of the original lineup that recorded Permission (including fu-manchu'ed bassist Frankie Poullain, who checked out shortly before One Way Ticket), with no less a pomp-rock master than Bob Ezrin behind the mixing board.
Justin Hawkins may be the face and attention-seizing voice of the Darkness, but the heart of their sound lies in his guitar playing, which offsets brother Dan's Angus Youngian raunch with the sort of rich, harmonic solos that Tom Scholz used to slather on Boston records. And despite the band's love of heavy metal histrionics, Hot Cakes furthers the notion that the Darkness are, in essence, a very slick power-pop band, one that's as beholden to "Peace of Mind" as Piece of Mind. But even with its generous supply of candy-coated riffs and easy-flowing melodies, Hot Cakes still goes down like lukewarm Eggo waffles: comfort-food familiar, but sapped of the frisson that made the Darkness special.
What always kept the Darkness from degenerating into Steel Panther-grade Sunset Strip parody was Justin Hawkins' flair for emasculating his band's crotch-rock thrust with self-effacing absurdity-- like the way "Growing on Me" worked as a soundtrack to both blossoming romance and STD diagnosis, or how his courtship strategy on "Friday Night" involved making a date for badminton. Notwithstanding Hawkins' ear-piercing exhortation to "suck my cock" on the origin-myth intro "Every Inch of You", Hot Cakes mostly swaps out the singer's singular musings for pat, broad-stroked sentiments about not stopping ("Nothin's Gonna Stop Us"), hanging on ("Keep Me Hangin' On"), and everybody having a good time ("Everybody Have a Good Time"). The band's upcoming European tour with Lady Gaga thus makes perfect sense-- not just because both value Queen-scaled spectacle, but because they both also deal in the same sort of self-esteem-building fortune-cookie philosophy.
Ironically, the one time the Darkness truly assert their peculiar personality on Hot Cakes is when they cover another band's song-- and not just any song, but Radiohead's "Street Spirit (Fade Out)", that crucial, transitory track serving as the gateway from the futurist Britpop of The Bends into the band's first dystopian masterpiece, OK Computer. The Darkness, however, simply hear it as the greatest song Iron Maiden never wrote, translating the original's dreamy intensity into a battlefield-conquering rallying cry, powered by a steel-grinding locomotive chug and Hawkins' stratospheric cry of the chorus (not to mention a clever quote of Radiohead's "Just" for good measure). But beyond merely subjecting this sacred cow to a good rogering, the 80s-metal makeover brilliantly blurs the line critics like to draw between Serious, Respectable Rock Bands and Silly, Ridiculous Rock Bands. The Darkness may not care to join the ranks of the former, but it takes a considerable amount of craft and artistry to reduce Radiohead to the latter.
