Do You Like Rock Music

Since forming in 2000, Brighton renegades British Sea Power have firmly stomped their own path. Whether dressing up as 1930s Boy Scouts on stage, walking through their audiences beating drums or exploring the peripheries of rock music (as on their first two albums 2003s The Decline Of British Sea Power and 2005s Open Season) they have honed a style thats all their own. Do You Like Rock Music? sees the band continue their uniquely exploratory approach. Enlisting producers Efrim Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and Graham Sutton (Jarvis Cocker), the band seem even more determined in their effort to create something adventurous. But despite these veteran helping hands and the towering, oppressive atmospheres that mark the introductory songs on the album-all pounding drums, bleak rockscapes and chanting choruses-this is a deceptively accessible record. Tunes like "Atom" and "Down on the Ground"--both heard last on the band's Krankenhaus EP)--are full of edgy BSP bombast; but Arcade Fire-esque opener "All in It," the shoegazery "Canvey Island," "Great Skua,"--and especially "Waving Flags"--are stadium-sized songs to wave your lighter around to. Then again, BSP playing it safe is still a much more convincing--not to mention entertaining--proposition than many of their conformist contemporaries. Rollickin stuff. --Danny McKenna

1. All In It 2:11