Album Review: Light Me Up by The Pretty Reckless

At their best, the Pretty Reckless are just the right band to combine the dirty blues swagger of White Stripes with the acidic guitar rasp of Shellac, but even at their most conventional, they are a very good unit worth describing with excited expletives. The two opening cuts are the most delicious in that regard, packing plenty of grooves and plenty of heaviness -- and "Since You're Gone" is the best female-fronted metal answer to Led Zeppelin out there, as powerful and venomous as Zepp's own "Since I've Been Loving You" was mellow and rambling. After that, the band retreats into safer alt/nu-metal territory, returning to the blues only for the two final songs (one of which is actually a country-fied ballad), but even there, they are still good -- more ferocious than average radio rockers, and with better pop savvy, too.

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Taylor Momsen’s evolution from Goldilocked Gossip Girl star to snarling, sooty-eyed hell-kitten has been mildly unsettling, considering she’s not yet 18. In fact, her birth year (1993, if that doesn’t make you feel Paleolithic) seems to be the wellspring for her band the Pretty Reckless: Light Me Up is clearly built from the doll parts of that era’s grunge goddesses — a sometimes too-slick conceit that Momsen’s thousand-Marlboro growl still manages to sell surprisingly well. B? Download These:Spiraling guitar slugger Make Me Wanna Die at Last.fmBruised ballad You at Last.fm See all of this week’s reviews .

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The Pretty Reckless Usually it falls to the writers to get a character purged from a network television series, but Taylor Momsen, who plays the naïve manipulator Jenny Humphrey on “Gossip Girl,” appears to be taking matters into her own hands. For the last two years her other alter ego has been as the frontwoman of the Pretty Reckless, a battering ram of a hard-rock band that she has no difficulty steering. “Light Me Up” (Interscope) is the group’s first full-length album, and it’s terrific fun: salacious, convincingly muscular, unnervingly rowdy.

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Everything here is a guilty pleasure. You know it’s wrong, but it feels so right. Chris Roberts 2010. The Pretty Reckless are pretty much a shoo-in for critical drubbings in the UK, whatever noise they make. They push every wrong button. Teenage girl singer wearing lingerie onstage and writhing ….

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