Old clothes do not make a tortured artist" claim the liner notes on Searching for the Young Soul Rebels. Then why do Dexy's Midnight Runners, a punky British R&B band with Stax-Volt pretensions, go to such melodramatic extremes to wear their Sixties-style soul on so tattered an aesthetic sleeve? These guys are simply too busy hitting you with their rhythm shtick about a lost tribe of English youth...

Armed with a folio of hearty Stax/Volt-style tunes and enough pretensions to poetic spirituality to sink a shipful of Solomon Burkes, singer-writer Kevin Rowland took Dexys Midnight Runners on a desperate hunt for a mythic tribe of bold new British youth on 1980's Searching for the Young Soul Rebels. That same anthemic breast-beating and soapbox arrogance also scuttle the band's second album,...