The Drugstore Cowboys, Chapter 3006

Though British psychobilly revivalists the Drugstore Cowboys tore things up on Rockabilly Rumble Deuce with their track “Game Over,” they — wait, that’s not right.

Popular cover band The Drugstore Cowboys always wows the crowd at the San Antonio Continental — nope, nope, that’s not it either.

OK, here it is. D.C. duo the Drugstore Cowboys blends the androgynous post-hardcore antics of the Blood Brothers with the electronic political-coke-party antics of Fischerspooner for a full-length record that is so consistently antic-driven that it is somewhat difficult to take seriously. Producer Philippe Grenade has an interesting sense of collage that frequently juxtaposes incongruous musical elements at a rapid pace, and the effect can be pleasantly disorienting, but the similar juxtaposition of hardcore throat-shredding with overproduced crooning merely sounds contrived.

The band’s credibility is not aided by their cartoonishly uncreepy lyrics: “I detest your silicone laughter, fake like all the New York watches … Stop pretending like your [sic] simple / We all know that youre [sic] diseased / Like a leech of dieting cancer / You are the reason for all this sickness… ” (That’s from “Only Fire Drive Away the Rats,” by the by.) “Like a leech of dieting cancer”? Even the Deftones couldn’t get away with that. Chapter 3006 further loses points for including a sample of a 911 caller from the World Trade Center — honestly, how tasteless do you have to be to think that’s a good idea? — and taking an extended potshot at the South on the meaninglessly entitled “Pornographic Fruitstands:” “Georgian scum is sleeping under bridges / If you want lost souls you will find them there…you bible-belt joke rotting with strippers / This is your classic American shit hole / Welcome to the wasteland.”

I suppose it would be impolitic to mention that D.C. is a long way from being the Lost City of Gold, or that no mayor of Atlanta has ever been convicted of smoking crack. Likewise, it would be undignified to point out that Georgia is currently producing some of the best metal (Mastodon), garage (the Black Lips), math-rock (the Blame Game), noise (Deerhunter), and hip-hop (Outkast) in the country, while if it weren’t for Ian Mackaye and other people who have far too much class to talk shit about an entire state, no record label would touch bands from fourth-rate music scenes like D.C., and ignorant posers like the Drugstore Cowboys would spend their 20s freezing and starving in New York or, more likely, parking cars in L.A., until they finally gave up and spent the rest of their lives writing gratingly hip and unfunny television commercials and turning into Republicans…although perhaps it wouldn’t be as impolitic or undignified as other things I could have written instead.

Finally, in the interest of aiding them the next time they start a band, I wish to call the attention of the Drugstore Cowboys to a useful new website called Google…