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Johnny Borrell is an easy target—an apparently self-righteous, arrogant fellow that makes personal attacks against bands no worse than his own, compares himself to Bob Dylan and brags he can write the best song you’ve ever heard if given ten minutes. So I continue to pray that one day the world will get a Razorlight album worth hearing so the temptation to knock Borrell will dissipate—it’s like shooting douchebags in a barrel. But I don’t care that’s he’s out of his freakin’ mind; a lot of great frontmen were prickly off-stage. I do care that he would have the temerity to play a private and vicious joke on the public by releasing Slipway Fires. I’m not going to be suckered into this elaborate (and ill-timed) April Fools joke. There’s no way that this album is actually being released for purchase…right?

It must be a prank since no joy is attained from trashing this record. Musically, it’s not so glaringly awful that it makes you cringe from the opening notes. On the other hand, it’s so lyrically absurd and dim-witted that I have to assume this is a tongue-in-cheek spoof. Spinal Tap couldn’t crudely represent all that’s wrong in the world of rock music better than Borrell’s pen. But the rest of the band isn’t keeping pace—instead of over-the-top theatrics, slab riffs and an abundance of pianos and strings to squeeze out every artificial tear, we get blandly serviceable gunk. Like Jet’s second album, these are arrangements that could put a Red Bull addict to sleep. Boring and insufferable are not compatible bedfellows. These guys can’t even get generic and buffoonish right; instead, they choose to form some sort of hybrid that can be described as…oh, let’s say, “slipwish,” in honor of the album title.

At least if the two modes were similar, we could snicker at it, maybe even rattle our skulls until it became a guilty pleasure. And the bluntly tedious can be tolerable if you just keep your other senses keen. But to borrow from Ghost World, this is an album so bad that it goes right past good and ends up back at bad. I’m even going to pretend that Borrell is an earnest and likable fellow (which he may very well be, if there’s a widespread conspiracy in the media against him) so I can address his inadequacy without resorting to mere defamation of character. His personality has no bearing on musical quality, just the music and lyrics he records.

Take first track (and lead single), “Wire to Wire,” a mawkish piano ballad much more in the spirit of their self-titled second album than their debut. “How do you love with a fate full of rust?/How do you turn what the savage take?” “How do you love on a night without feelings?/She says 'Love, I hear sound, I see fury'." “She lives by disillusion’s glow/We go where the wild blood flows/On our bodies, we share the same scar.” Borrell begins with a creaky, full-throated warble, but when his voice jumps an octave and erupts to full bloom, flares out a couple of falsettos and is joined by back-up vocals, I challenge you not to cringe.

Closer, “The House,” is even worse—a laborious, self-pitying downer halfway between the Boss and Meatloaf (if they positioned their sound towards AOR/adult contemporary). I can forgive the opening verse where Borrell wrenches his soul to give us: “There’s a full moon over this ancient town/A clock face the color of the sky/And every street that we walk down/Belongs to the house where my father died.” But then, “Now it comes through me like an injection/Anonymous pain throbbing real inside/And every pulse in my body/Belongs to the house where my father died.” And let’s not forget excruciating groaners like, “I'm a child fighting shadows with tears in my eye,” “Won’t catch a spirit in a candle” and “While I claim my place at center stage.” No singer alive could sell that dreck.

In between, we get priceless lines like, “Tabloid lover, box to box runner/Tabloid lover, page three stunner,” “I’ve got a hot-bodied girlfriend who makes the cameras flash,” “If I had to choose between me and you/I’d choose me although I know that I’d lose,” “For telling my story I have been crucified,” and “I am salvation and your herald of sin.” Read that last one again. No joke; and delivered with what could only be described as abject sincerity. I apologize for forcing you to read all of these clunkers, but the silence of those words in your mind’s eye is much better than hearing Borrell’s voice echo each self-aggrandizing sentiment in your ears. And don’t even get me started on the overly effusive Dylan reference on “Monster Boots.”

The worst of words can be swallowed bitterly or entirely ignored if the music grabs you. But there is nothing intoxicatingly catchy or interminably awful about any of it. “Tabloid Lover” begins sprightly enough, with siren guitars and a rough rumble backbeat, but it’s a performance with eyes half-closed; were they just running through the motions in order to plug in a requisite hard rocker? “Blood for Wild Blood” wants to be an arch epic that draws you in until a thunderstorm can unleash Borrell’s howl, but it’s shapeless and closes with a rasp that belies any forced drama that came before it; the song can’t even compete with Bob Seger’s goofiest moments. “Burberry Blue Eyes” begins with a piano and drum pound like Elton John’s honky-tonk workouts, but it builds to nothing but a wheezy sigh draped over the bum-bum rhythm, save for five seconds of prog-rock flourishes that are laughably out of place. As for the gentler numbers, “60 Thompson” might have been an album highlight, with its fluttery acoustic plucking reminiscent of 60s folk troubadours (i.e. Simon & Garfunkel), but where poetic words formed the background to such earlier sparsely instrumented tales, Borrell’s language botches each landing.

It sounds as if Borrell and the rest of the group (I don’t know how much songwriting sway the rest of them have) have listened to piles of Dylan, Springsteen, J. Geils Band, Sting, Dire Straits and anything else remotely similar and have taken notes on what they admired. Then they strolled into the studio, found a single idea they liked for a song, then stretched it out for four minutes and forgot about important details such as context, gravitas and soul—not to mention melodic hooks. It’s like they’re trying to play an unplugged set with instruments flipped on and are just tinkering with back-and-forth notes to see if anything sticks. And then sent in the wrong tape. They can’t even steal from their influences with skill—how did they manage to make Meatloaf pomposity as drab as a rainy, grey morning?

I guess I could give them credit for not being the same Libertines-offshoot they were on their first record, Up All Night. But as mediocre as Up All Night was, at least there were a couple of listenable (if still lyrically oppressive) tracks scattered about like “Golden Touch” and “Somewhere Else.” But if you thought that Razorlight was a bad second effort, wait ‘til you get a load of this one. At least Slipway Fires only clocks in at about thirty-five drowsy minutes. Time enough for a quick catnap. That is, if the words didn’t haunt your memory for hours afterwards. Utterly flavorless and shamefaced; these guys are so slipwish, aren’t they?