Men Without Pants

Dan the Automator and former Blues Explosion drummer Russell Simins have a laudable goal here -- injecting something raw, like a Stooges-style sonic assault, back into rock's irony-damaged corpse. Nonetheless, there's something conventional at work underneath all the distorted vocals and mussed hair. Simins toils a bit too hard at his fury to be totally convincing, while lines like "They don't talk about this in indie rock songs" suggest he's a little too obsessed with the competition to be working straight from his own muse. Highlights include "I Do" and "And the Girls Go."