Pitchfork

Polish your royal metaphors and lube up the groupies because rawk is back, and oh boy do I mean it this time. I mean rawk. I mean raunchy songs about sleazy fucking and raunchy guitar that squeals like a guitar sleazily fucking. I mean paunchy guys with eyeliner muttering, "Who's your daddy?" in fake British accents, and you know they're serious about their raunchy sleazy guitar fucking or else their whole fucking act is a fucking act. Rawk!

These guys will steal your girlfriend and knock her up in your Econoline van, but they'll do it sensitive-style, like: "Hey carrot juice, I wanna squeeze ya every way until ya bleed." That's from their super-rad hit single "Finding Out True Love Is Blind", which is Julian Casablancas singing the Stones' "Some Girls" or the "About a Million Girls" song from The Simpsons over the chords from Green Day's "Brain Stew" played through Jack White's distortion pedals. Plus it has a beat you can dance to, but that's OK because chicks dig that shit.

This album has raunchy sleazy guitar solos, like on opener "Louis XIV", which sounds like Noel Gallagher fucking AC/DC's guest list in assless chaps. Lead Louis man Jason Hill tells MTV that I've never heard T. Rex, and of course he's right. I haven't heard Mark E. Smith, either, but my pansy-ass neighbor says something called Art Brut "does more with Smith's influence." Plus, he says make-out anthem "Marc" sounds like a Ben Folds post-Five piano ballad with delusions of "Life's a Gas"-like grandeur instead of humor or melodicism. Twerp doesn't get half the tang I do, though. Rawk!

These songs have lyrics that don't have to make sense because the guy singing them is too busy with raunchy sleazy fucking for all that shit; lines like "you said so in a letter that said return to sender, my illegally illegal tender." Timeless, yes, but Hill's words are timely, too: "weapon of mass destruction" in a rawk song? What next? There's also an instrumental, "Louis Reprise", which starts like the Beatles' "The End" from Dad's classic rock station but swerves into fiddles and horns, like a more frat-ready Dave Matthews Band, whose concert last year almost got me stoned and laid, so whatever. Fuckin' rawk!

One bummer: No actual swearing. The "parental advisory" sticker is just for the cover, which is worth the price alone if only as proof you're not a homo even though you just bought a record named after a French historical figure (like John Kerry, haw haw), unless the chick's really a dude like on that Roxy Music album under my bed. But it's really all rawk, rawk, rawk unless the Sun King is wearing no clothes like Fred Durst in that stolen Sidekick video I of course didn't watch.