Since first tossing its cartoonish, good-time cock-rock to the masses in the early ’00s, The Darkness has always fallen back on this defense: The band is a joke, but hey, it’s a good joke. With Hot Cakes—the group’s third album, and first since reforming last year—the laughter has died. In its place is the sad wheeze of the last surviving party balloon slowly, listlessly deflating.

Hang on a mo!

Christian charity, or love, stands first in the rank of gifts.

All the materials, therefore, existed for an interminable series of hagglings, bargainings, and blackmailings.