Darker Blue

A.R.E. Weapons really couldn't make their influences more clear if they tried. Reduced to a duo of singer Brian McPeck and multi-instrumentalist Matt McAuley, they've dropped all pretensions they've ever had to being anything more than a Suicide cover band. All of Alan Vega and Martin Rev's sonic signatures are present and accounted for: that hollow double-time rhythm box, lashes of psychobilly-surf guitar, oscillating drones, hiccupping vocals, etc. Superficially, these nine songs are an impressive feat of post-punk mimicry, but what's missing is any sense of depth. There's none of the existential anguish of a "Frankie Teardrop," or the bruised lust of "Cheree." In fact, the lyrics of songs like "Subway" and "What the Fuck Do You Want" are so laughably inane that only McPeck's utterly humorless delivery keeps them from sounding like they were meant to be funny. (Admittedly, titling a song "Jeffrey Lee" after the singer of The Gun Club is probably genuinely an in-joke, given that Vega once recorded a song called "Kid Congo" after the Gun Club guitarist.) Heard one at a time on a dance floor or in an iPod shuffle, these songs are an amusing impersonation of an older, better band, but taken as a whole, this mercifully short album is just deadening.