The title is meant even more ironically than you’d think. Who in the world could ever be afraid of The Danks? With a sound this convivial, the only people who could hate these guys are those people who go to parties just to sit in dark corners and look at everyone with contempt. Who am I kidding – even they’d go for this.

The PEI band released a slight but enjoyable EP last year called Samples, and their music is in the same “Velvet Underground instrumentation and chord changes, played at 60s-mainstream-pop tempos” line as The Strokes, The Pillows, Wir sind Helden, Tokyo Police Club, The Vines, and a downward trajectory of thousands of artists that finally bottoms out at your cousin’s crappy garage band.

What makes The Danks different from a lot of these staccato-chord-driven groups is that The Danks (featuring two members from the more famous Two Hours Traffic) have no delusions of grandeur, no nutty impulses to dive into territory where they’re not comfortable (yet). Are You Afraid of The Danks? doesn’t ‘flow’ in the sense of being a pristine indie plateau of emotional highs and lows. It’s a collection of stellar songs by a bunch of guys who sound like they’re toying around in a basement with some songs – and happen to be really, really good at it. Wisely, the band put no up-and-down emotional curve on this album as a whole; the way you know it’s over is that it ends.

The guitar chord progressions are standard I-IV-V, but they’re played (by Two Hours Traffic’s Alec O’Hanley) with a kind of jittery enthusiasm that – coupled with the high-in-the-mix bass by Andrew MacDonald (can you tell that these guys are from the East Coast?) – always seems to move. Unlike the lazy, tossed-off songwriting by some of their contemporaries, the playing is kept tightly-wound and danceable.

The zillions of great hooks that punctuate the songs at every twist and turn aside, it’s a credit to the band that they often incorporate little flourishes into their songs that resonate. There’s some syncopated chords on “Die Young” and a lot of great bass lines – usually based around only two or three notes – in songs like “Shifty” that may remind you of early Cure singles, the bass and guitar seeming almost electronic while the edgy drums (by Phil MacIsaac) keep things grounded, hitting the cymbals on unexpected beats and building from a simple 4/4 snare into a mini-garage-orchestra of percussion.

Singer Brohan Moore’s voice sounds more raggedy and inviting than the sea of cold, stagnant singing by many others in this ilk. Whether he mumbles the lyrics purposely a la Michael Stipe in 1983, or whether the album is just badly recorded doesn’t matter – it melds perfectly.

They draw many parallels to their ingrained influences – “No Radio” takes on the guitar work of Andy Gill (Gang of Four) just as “Shifty” takes on 154-era Wire. You can even sense direct melodies that take off from others: the guitar line in opener “What We’re Doing” sounds like the solo in Sid Vicious’ “My Way,” and the synth line (yes, they use synths, too!) in “What’s the Rush” sounds like a fractured take on “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Yeah.

Are You Afraid of The Danks? is the kind of album that zooms by with so many catchy hooks and with so much bright musicianship that you really can’t do anything but put it on repeat. When was the last time an album from one of these ‘garage rock revival’ bands did that for you? Oh, and as for how these guys stack up against their cohorts: well, if The Strokes had made First Impressions of Earth half as fun as this, they would’ve had a lot fewer pissed-off college kids.

For more from The Danks,
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/meetthedanks