Album: The Warlocks

Phoenix, Birdman / City Rockers

Effusively hailed as one of the best new guitar bands, this UK debut from the Los Angeles septet The Warlocks is a huge disappointment. Expecting something fresh, wild and innovative, I was shocked to encounter such grim, plodding smackhead dirges as "Isolation" and the aptly titled "Cosmic Letdown", a ghastly nine-minute endurance test featuring some of the least edifying guitar-wank indulgences ever committed to tape. Or so it seems, until one reaches the climactic "Oh Shadie", which takes even longer to get nowhere in particular, revelling in backwards guitar and drums for no less than 14 minutes. It might not be so bad if it weren't all so derivative, mostly of The Velvet Underground, with the opening "Shake the Dope Out" effectively just combining the riffs of "Sister Ray" and "White Light/White Heat", and "The Dope Feels Good" being thematically just a limp retread of "I'm Waiting for the Man", a junkie's anticipation of his fix. How cool is that? Well, not very: with all we've learnt about heroin since 1967, it no longer seems like an audacious challenge to the social norms of straight society, just irresponsible and rather pathetic, conforming as it does to some half-baked mythology of rock'n'roll excess. What's most surprising is how little The Warlocks achieve with such a sizeable line-up. Tracks such as "Inside Outside" and "Red Rooster" are laboured and methodical rather than soaring and epiphanic; and there's never any danger, for all their suggestions of psychedelic abandon, that The Warlocks might lose control and discover something new. That would mean having an idea of their own.