DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY

Something in the Nashville area reservoir? A few too many lead paint chips peeled and eaten off windowsills as babies? The last band from Tennessee to pop up on the radar was the delightfully off-the-wall LOOK WHAT I DID, and now we're graced with the presence of DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY, another irritating moniker saddled upon another kickass, irreverent band who take nothing — including themselves — seriously.

DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY (seriously, that's giving my word processor fits. How about DDD or 3D from here on in?) are a little easier to pigeonhole, though. If you want to completely oversimplify things, call 'em the American CHILDREN OF BODOM — keyboards, fruity squealing guitar trills, croaking death 'n roll vocals, and the same snotty swagger and leather underwear as our favorite guilty-pleasure Finns. You could compare them to 3 INCHES OF BLOOD, too, in their are-they-kidding-or-aren't-they silliness and over-the-top demeanor. And like those bands, catchiness rules even more than bullet belts (okay, almost as much) – just wait till you're singing, with lusty abandon, "ripped apart by the juggernaut of fornication!"

Cheese? Yes, great rancid Wisconsin wheels of it. But it sounds massive, and it's a good time, and if you have an ounce of fun left in you, you can totally overlook the fact that it's tremendously goofy and blatantly unoriginal. It's maybe a bit more black metal in places than rock and roll, and there are enough straightforward metal moments to leaven the sweet-tooth rot of the more BODOM-like passages and occasional keyboard solos.

D TO THE D TO THE D will scratch your melodic death metal itch in a positively European way, even as some of the band's post-ironic American smirking smartassery shines through (or maybe it's just that picture of the drummer, nascent beer gut slopping over his leather pants as he wields both a spiked armband and nerdy glasses, that's giving me that impression). With this as a starting point, it'll be quite interesting to see where these guys go from here — they're perhaps a little too derivative at this point to be truly essential listening, but they're definitely a good time.