Substance abuse The Darkness’s unblinking voyage into the preposterous BY JAMES PARKER

If I were in the Darkness, playing drums (my instrument), I think I would have to be an addict of some kind — an alcoholic, probably. How else to anæsthetize the psyche-splitting agony of being funny and not funny at the same time? Of being in a parodic ha-ha hard-rock band who actually and seriously rock? Of being, as it were, simultaneously post-modern and pre-modern? With absurdity draped over every power chord, and a smirk in every lyric, still there’s headbanging in the front row. Perhaps it’s ha-ha headbanging — who can tell? Yep, bring down the booze curtain, lower the heavy velvet on this torment of sophistication.

But that’s just me. The members of the Darkness themselves, and in particular frontman Justin Hawkins, appear to have been gifted with a tolerance for the most advanced and perilous states of irony. At the lip of the stage, arm raised god-like over a roaring guitar, Hawkins will break off and sniff his own armpit. The English band’s second album, One Way Ticket to Hell . . . And Back (Atlantic), continues their unblinking voyage into the preposterous, this time with the sub-Thin Lizzy-Bad Company-AC/DC guitar posturings and vocal tweakouts bedded in an improbable lushness. There are layered Queen harmonies, prim and venomous; mega-expensive guitars; a drum sound fat and swollen with bullion. Hawkins’s renegade falsetto and obsessive-compulsive punster lyrics ("Is it just me, or am I all on my own again?") are even more lovingly showcased, as is his quaint melodic instinct, which on "Girlfriend" conjures more of Strawberry Switchblade than it does of Whitesnake. But that’s by-the-by. This is effervescent enormo-rock, and the Darkness will conquer again. They’ve got rid of the cadaverous, unconvincingly head-scarved bassist and replaced him — smart move — with a roadie. Nothing can stop them now.

At the heart of the Darkness are the Hawkins brothers: Dan (guitar) and Justin (vocals, occasional guitar). From the easternmost town in England, snoozy Lowestoft, in sodden, agricultural Suffolk, they launched their imaginations, projecting a gaudy pantomime of rock against the damp sky. One Way Ticket leads off with the title track, whose first 20 seconds feature an ominous choral drone, some chilly puffs of Andean pan pipe, razor-on-mirror chopping sounds, and a prolonged nasal inhalation-noise. "It was a dusty old night," muses Hawkins with red-rimmed nostrils, "and I’m the first to admit it . . . " It’s a cocaine song. Pan pipes of the Andes — cocaine. Get it? Just in case you didn’t, he presses home the point with, uh, lines like "chewing my face off, talking absolute rubbish" and "now my septum is in tatters." It may be the best hard-rock song about cocaine since Buckcherry’s "Lit Up," with a broad and breastbeating "Highway to Hell" of a chorus.

Dan Hawkins is not quite a master of negative space like AC/DC’s Angus Young, whose riffs — those mighty chunks in the keys of G or A — seem to be sculpted like monoliths out of the primordial boredom of Australia. But he can make his guitar go crunch. "Black Shuck," off 2003’s Permission To Land (Atlantic), about a folkoric English dog beast ("Black Shuck! Black Shuck! That dog don’t give a fuck!"), was authentic post-Young power rock, with a touch of Axl in the electrically stuttering "nih-nih-nih-nih-nih-nih-NO!" There’s nothing that meaty on One Way Ticket; the glittering patina of its production puts it closer to Foreigner or the epically despised Swedish pop-metal heroes Europe. "Seemed like a Good Idea at the Time" is even a proper soppy ballad, emotionally obese, without one joke in it. Then again, baring his heart and vowing to "cross a thousand miles of broken glass on my hands and knees" is about the most perverse move Justin Hawkins could make.

The rocking jester god, riding an iceberg of ’70s cliché, is a role that Hawkins was born to play. Just look at his face. Above: the broad angelic Peter Frampton forehead, emerging like the sunrise from waves of golden hair. Below: the rabbity Freddie Mercury overbite, the teeth of a carrot-nibbling trickster, suggesting mischief and riddles. And he has the sort of arced, tiny-buttocked physique that they stopped manufacturing around 1975, appropriate for jumpsuits and unitards. (During a typical show he’ll go through three or four.) The man’s a classic-rock Frankenstein. Up top he’s thinning a bit, but that’s just more grist for the mockery mill: the new track "Bald" ("From what I’ve been reading/The scalp needs kneading . . . ") is a moody odyssey through hereditary hair loss that seems to include the shameful purchase of a bottle of Rogaine. "It’s not for me, you understand!" he shrieks at a presumably blank-faced pharmacist. Physical frailty is a bit of a thing with Hawkins: when the band came through Boston last year, he was complaining, between David Lee Roth–style star jumps off the drum riser, of a bad back and an "ulcerated esophagus."

What does it mean, all this cleverness and deconstruction? Does it mean anything at all? It’s nothing new, of course. Hard-rock fans have long been self-ironizing. Put your average metalhead next to a straight-edger and he’s a paragon of humorous awareness. English mock-metallers Wolfsbane, heavier but only slightly less comedic than the Darkness, delighted their fans in the ’80s with T-shirts that read "Howling Mad Shithead." I saw one at a Slayer show once, right next to a shirt that read "Slatanic Wehrmacht." And what are the ever-popular "devil horns," the ancient mano cornuta imported into metal by (so he says) Ronnie James Dio, but a pair of quotation marks to put around a particularly ripe slice of bombast? Lemmy and the Nuge and Bon Scott — men of nimble wit, in touch with the ridiculous, the comedy of overstatement. Even Ozzy, dragging his vast and empty depression, managed to write "Fairies Wear Boots." You can sum up the whole approach with the title of one Motörhead song: "Killed by Death."

But these men were the originators: they were making it all up. The difference with the Darkness is that they — and we — are part of the karaoke generation, dumped on our bottoms at the end of rock history, with all of the great musical ideas of last 50 years shifting and circling around us in a blue-lit zombie dance. Choose one, prog-rock or sprog-rock or psychedelic ska-billy, and sing along. Dan Hawkins famously realized his brother’s frontman potential one night in a Lowestoft pub when he saw him doing a karaoke version of "Bohemian Rhapsody." "Bismillah NO!" thundered Justin into the coiled pubsmoke, through honking disco speakers, and suddenly a trapdoor flapped open in Dan’s mind — futurity beamed backward in a corridor of light . . . Yes!

And five years later, Roy Thomas Baker is enlisted to produce their second album — the very same Roy Thomas Baker who manned the boards for "Bohemian Rhapsody" back in the day. Can we imagine what might have been going through the mind of the aged Baker as he decorously adjusted the levels around the hooligan octaves of Justin Hawkins’s voice? We can’t. The layers of historical irony are too compacted. It makes the head hurt to think for long about the Darkness, which is why — and I don’t care how much money they offer me — I will not be joining this band. My mental health couldn’t take it.