Playlouder - Music is the Network

To say that Stone Gods debut ‘Silver Spoons & Broken Bones’ is anywhere near as hotly-anticipated as their previous incarnation's (The Darkness’ ‘Permission to Land’) would be an outright lie, but in many ways it’s a bigger accomplishment.

P2L was a handful of fine tunes glued together by AOR, whereas this is an albumful of fine AOR glued together by fine tunes.

Opener ‘Burn The Witch’ is glorious in its pomposity and preposterousness, and things keep going for a good while with doses of delightfully-dated man rock, often dumb, sometimes misogynistic, usually funny, and altogether top-drawer for its genre.

For the most part it’s of a sort of ACDC-meets-Die Toten Hosen (with a dash of Rush) variety; the direction certainly seems to be a conscious shift towards heavy metal and away from the old glammed-up super cock-rock of Justin Hawkins’ lead.

It’s surely unlikely to convince the younger half of the Metal Hammer readership, but with riffs so classic you could stuff them and mount them, and lines as precious as ‘”You brought a knife to a gun fight, so fuck you”, “Never trust a lover… they’ll drag you through a river of shit” and “there’s gonna be a fire tonight, were gonna see a woman burn”, little things like trends, fashions and relevance won't worry them in the slightest.

Stone Gods' debut succeeds in being the first ‘new’ hard rock record for a hell of a long time that I have the inclination to listen to a second and indeed a third time. And I’m not yet sick of it!

‘Magdalene Street’, I suppose, is a bit wet: a bit like Rod Stewart with a cold, but ‘Lazy Bones’ fares better, being an honest-to-goodness rock ballad with lovely ‘”Woo-ooh” backing vocals.

Perhaps the real statement of intent here is ‘Start of Something’; opening with the amusingly-honest quip, “I’ve got my mind / Don’t want to use it…” it has a more classic rock / drive-time sound than much of the rest of the album and, surprisingly, is the best track here. 

The line “we are not afraid to turn another page / because we know these things they happen for a reason” is an encouraging and even convincing message'; to have replaced everyone’s favourite member of The Darkness (Frankie) and then to have been around just long enough to see the band dissolve, only to rise again Phoenix-like as the head of an altogether different beast (if you’ll excuse the mixed-metaphor) is no mean feat. 

Hats off to Richie Edwards (no relation) – he and the band have come up with an album that’ll have middle-aged men everywhere reaching for their air guitars and banging their balding heads – and that’s ain’t such an easy thing to achieve.

‘Silver Spoons & Broken Bones’ is balls-to-the-grindstone rock and/or roll and I like it.