Dickies
LPs are like comets: rarely sighted, always great. The fourth LP over a 16-year career and first since 1989's
Second Coming
is another humorous
punk-pop
LP that brings huge smiles. If a little more spotty than
, there's still plenty of lip-smacking tunes highlighted by the band's obvious strength all these years, singer
Leonard Phillips
. His cartoonish delivery has sometimes obfuscated what a fine singer he actually is. You see that here on
"Toxic Avenger,"
guitarist
Stan Lee
's
Motoerhead
/
Kiss
Queen
Ozzy
parody (complete with MOR keyboards/guitars) that contains the LP's biggest hooks, thanks to
Phillips
' consummate singing. "Out of the rust and into the slime/Everyone thinks that he's out of his mind" is a big hook, a scream of a superhero sendup. Many missed
"Just Say Yes"
on the previous year's
"Roadkill"
single, but it's the hottest
-
pop
since the song it openly rips off, the
Dawn of the Dickies
single
"Manny, Moe & Jack."
"Zeppelina"
is good goofy-gas, and
"Elevator"
and
"Pretty Ballerina"
are the sort of great '60s radio
the band moved into in the late '80s, both done so well they should've been splashed all over the radio. And to revisit another old theme, "Stuck in a pagoda with
Tricia Toyota
" is updated to "Stuck in a condo with Mr.
Marlon Brando
": "He's big and hairy/He's really scaring me." Prepare to burst out laughing, thinking of
Marlon
in
the New York Post
, when that comes on. Once upon a time,
the Dickies
were about the only U.S.
punk
band that sold records anywhere, with six straight U.K. hit singles. A decade and a half later it was "the year that
broke," and no one seemed to want to know
not only still existed, but that they were killer and comic as ever. ~ Jack Rabid