Sleaze rock. Glam rock. Cock rock. Essentially it all adds up to cod pieces and really, really bad hair, with some low-slung guitars added as a prop to bag the chicks. The Glitterati have already and unapologetically proved themselves as that, with their enjoyable live stints more influenced by LA than their native Leeds. But you can’t hear image on your headphones and without their sunglasses to hide behind, they ain’t so hot.
Lacking the talent of either, their debut is the Darkness sans irony or The Wildhearts without the intelligence. In fact this is just lowest common denominator stuff, lacking a tangent to make the genre’s cringeworthy clichés forgivable. It’s predictably performed, with the sneery vocals in the right places and Slash-esque guitars making a worrying effort at being effortlessly cool. The formulaic structure of every track is generally driven by testosterone-filled verse-chorus-verse rants about sex, drugs and …sorry, I nearly fell asleep there. You get the picture.
From the trying-to-be-punchy opener of ‘Betterman’ to the shock ending of – get this – a quiet acoustic number to close, it leaves not the smallest impression, and not even the work of G’n’R knob-twiddler Mike Clink can prevent the album from flatlining.
That said, there’s the faintest signs of life in ‘Don’t Do Romance’, a mid-tempo, self-deprecating number about crazy rock’n’roll relationships which is a solid piece of simplistic rock, but it takes a desperate album to hold up the one song that doesn’t grate as its highlight.