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.

The custom of the lich-wake, corresponding largely with the surviving Irish custom of waking the dead, had not then died out in Scotland, and in Monifieth was frequently practised.

Her face wasn't quite as pretty as he had hoped — Earl, the other mechanic back at his father's place called this kind of girl a Butterface...

What've you been up to?