POP MUSIC REVIEW : Buck Pets Have a Metal Outlook in Rock

There may be hemming and hawing in some quarters over this, but take our word for it: The Buck Pets is indeed a metal band, just as surely as the Dallas quartet’s obvious formative role model, Black Sabbath, was a metal band.

Making their local debut Thursday at the Lingerie, these lads were even more the iron men than on their likable first album; live, you’d be hard-pressed to cold-guess their, er, sensitive side.

They do have a sensitive side, which is why the Replacements are often cited as a reference point, and heaven knows lead Replacement Paul Westerburg could’ve been a minor metal figurehead if he hadn’t opted for melody over riffing. The Buck Pets show no signs of any such predilection yet, which is why the other most-cited comparison--Metallica--is more apt. The Pets are probably not pretentious enough to land an opening slot on a Monsters of Rock II tour, but if they did, there might be similar fence-rushing aplenty.

If one is indeed smart, one hesitates to call this stuff “smart metal,” since it’s difficult to reckon through the musical buzz whether these boys are rocket-scientists-in-the-making or not. But a quick rundown of Thursday’s SAT scores reveals they’re at least bright enough not to succumb to macho posturing, fashion statements or even overrated Metallica-style quasi-political statements.

At the Lingerie: Just four skinny guys--in T-shirts or bare-chested--with hair drooping over their downturned faces, chirping not all that depressingly about relationships to the kind of dark, thrash-suitable tones usually reserved for the devil and his minions, with plenty of tunes under four minutes in length (i.e., hardly a guitar solo in earshot) and only one with a rock-god tempo change. Incredibly derivative? Yes. But--for its basic lack of today’s standard affectations--incredibly iconoclastic.