*1/2 Rollins Band

GET SOME GO AGAIN

(DreamWorks)

By the time Henry Rollins threw in the towel a couple of years ago on the longest-running incarnation of his Rollins Band, which by then had unraveled into blandly earnest jazz-rock fusion, even he had become bored with it. For a while, it seemed there might not be enough time left in his busy schedule of performance lectures, desktop publishing, TV voiceovers, big-screen cameos, and sophomoric scribbling to mount another reasonable attempt at rock and roll. He's often said he doesn't distinguish among these endeavors -- it's all just work, and if his music sounds workmanlike, well, there isn't exactly any shame in it, either. He approaches rock and roll with the same kind of pragmatic indifference with which one might set about mowing the lawn, and by the time it's over he's already got the raw material for another dorm-room coffee-table tome.

For his latest album, a self-described reversion to hard rock, the editor of David Lee Roth's memoirs backed himself with, apparently, the first band he stumbled across -- an anonymous LA blues-rock trio called Mother Jefferson -- and, well, you gets whats you pays for. Aside from the pedestrian tempos, and riffs as gray from overuse as the Marine-length growth at Hank's temples, there are a few simian silver linings. The band spark on a meaty cover of Thin Lizzy's "Are You Ready?" -- exactly the kind of dumbed-down fare Hank's been threatening to record for the past five years -- and catch fire on the original, convincingly Motörheaded number "You Let Yourself Down," which includes this immortal Rothian couplet: "Used to date porno, now you just rent/Do you really wonder where the good times went?" In fact, one wonders whether Diamond Dave hasn't completely captured Hammerin' Hank's imagination when, on a number called "Thinking Cap," Rollins declares he "just took off my thinking cap" because "it got filled up with too much crap." "You can dress up a pig, but it's still a pig, isn't it?" he adds, throwing in a few oinks, and laughing uproariously. Indeed it is.

-- Carly Carioli