From the press that this album was getting, I was expecting a dirty, grungy garage punk record, something along the lines of what The Kills or Die! Die! Die! might hit you with. Generally speaking, I find the whole retro hard rock garage thing to be pretty tiring, so I was anticipating that I'd hate this record. Nevertheless, as us music reviewers are required to do; I popped it into my CD player, closed my eyes, and prepared to be disappointed.

I was surprised then, when disappointment didn't happen. All of the adjectives that I'd seen applied to "We Came In Peace" seemed to apply, from 'retro', to 'dirty', to 'sneering', but despite the initial impression that these words might give you, "We Came In Peace" is also a surprisingly complex and deep record, that takes as much from the Rolling Stones as it does from The Stooges.

Take for example Shangri La, a shambolic lo-fi rocker that features it all, including a wonderfully fuzzy and trebly guitar solo, a rolling bass line that sounds like vintage The Living End, and a chiming guitar riff to open the song. Summer of Pain opens up like a Comets on Fire song before vocalist John Ziegler begins tossing off what sounds like an effortless vocal performance that sounds like a mix between Iggy Pop and Nick Cave.

In fact, the Nick Cave comparison is one that I haven't seen made a lot with this band, but Ziegler a lot of the time has the vocal down almost perfectly, particularly on the brooding Easy To Dream. Not only does he nail the timbre, but there is just enough post-punk venom in his delivery and in the band's music that it almost sounds like Cave in his glory days.

Don't be expecting a terribly nuanced album here, despite its depth, it's about as subtle as a cricket bat to the face in a lot of places. However, it's a pretty well crafted and surprisingly enjoyable slab of retro rock that manages to avoid sticking too close to its influences, while still taking the best bits and incorporating them into their own sound. If you want to get back to what made rock and roll so appealing in the first place, you could do a lot worse than "We Came In Peace".