If only every song here was as bruising, focused and funny. One Way Ticket to Hell . . . and Back is a classic case of a hot band with a hit debut -- 2003's Permission to Land -- running headlong into the sophomore jinx. Early sessions for this record were tense; Hawkins, his brother, guitarist Dan Hawkins, drummer Ed Graham and bassist Frankie Poullain broke up at one point. Justin also underwent therapy for a time. Then Poullain was canned in June, replaced on bass by Darkness guitar tech Richie Edwards.

One Way Ticket, produced by classic-rock icon Roy Thomas Baker, shows the strain. Big ideas abound -- swollen orchestras; bagpipe-guitar action; armies of overdubbed Justins peeling the paint off your ceiling in massed falsetto -- but to often misguided effect. "Girlfriend" is lightweight glam overstuffed with strings and brass: Sweet (the band) without the sass. "Hazel Eyes" is just confused: Highland-jig rock with a Chinese-opera vocal twist. "Dinner Lady Arms" struts like a chip off Permission's "I Believe in a Thing Called Love," but the mix deadens the swagger. The guitars cut like penknives, not sabers, and Justin's vocal fireworks seem to go off behind the boom of the band, instead of way out front as they did on Permission.

Baker knows a lot about making monster rock with just bass, drums, a little piano, tightly coiled guitars and a high-altitude voice: He produced Queen's first four LPs. So it's hard to imagine what possessed him to smother Justin's Freddie Mercury aspirations in the philharmonic ballast of "Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time" and "Blind Man." And why, in the title track, stick an electric sitar where a slicing guitar break should have been? It makes hell sound like an Indian restaurant.

There are moments when the lusty son-of-Sheer Heart Attack that One Way Ticket might have been punches through the disarray, such as Justin's spearing vocal hook in "Knockers" (too bad about the locker-room title). The ridiculously fast "English Country Garden" is a blatant Queen homage and a close second to "Bald" in laughs and balls: soprano-pitch guitars and Justin in full Mercury-theater voice, shrieking "jardin! jardin!" (French for "garden") as he swings his plow all over the land. "She said, 'Have you got a match?'/I said, 'Yes,'" he boasts in the first verse. "'My cock and Farmer Giles' prizewinning marrow'" -- "marrow," in this case, meaning squash. You'll laugh, with him or at him. But you'll laugh.

"One Way Ticket," a cocaine memoir with the emphatic ring of autobiography, sums up everything that is bold but not quite right about this album. The bravado is unmistakable -- a chorus with the sold-out-arena kick of Def Leppard's "Rock Rock ('Til You Drop)"; explicit description of what's left after the high times ("Now my septum is in tatters and I've still got the runs") -- but so is the insecurity underneath. Metal bands usually wait four or five albums before singing in earnest about the high price of getting wasted. Two records into his career, Justin can't seem to sing about anything else. "The wheels came off, but I'm still on track," he swears in "One Way Ticket," then spends the rest of the record in desperation and indecision: trying to get it on again with an over-the-hill girlfriend in "Dinner Lady Arms" ("I couldn't figure out where your figure had gone"); spinning in self-pity on "Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time."

In the end, having gone through hell to make this record, the Darkness don't spend enough of it just raising hell, the vintage guitar-army way. Next time, I recommend less worry -- and no strings.

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DAVID FRICKE

(Posted: Nov 28, 2005)