999,961: The Darkness — Is It Just Me?

Listening to the Darkness used to make me feel nostalgic for a youth spent loving, and then hating the music they so carefully recreated. Now, listening to them makes me feel nostalgic for a less distant past. I turn them on, close my eyes, and find myself transported back to another time, a time when I still Iiked the Darkness.

For irony has a shelf life, and so too did the Darkness, but if you ever find yourself wondering what they're still doing in you ipod, why not pop in this track? It's the band at their hardest rocking and least schticky and, for me at least, it comes closest to how they sound in my fondest memories. The vocals are stacked as high as always (to do otherwise would be a waste) but they have been stripped of the dumb jokes that weren't so much funny as signifiers to wary snobs that all this cock rock stuff wasn't serious. More importantly the guitars on this track are left mercifully unadorned: no sound effects, no E-bow, no honky tonk piano, no pan flutes. What's left is everything there is to love about this sort of music, delivered as a knowing throwback, but not as a slim ironic gag. And if a band came out today that sounded exactly like this I'm sure I'd love them…at least until I hated them.

Is It Just Me? [Album Version]...