For all the fingers they have on the pulse of their generation and all the fantastic stuff they love that you won't hear about for another three months, the guardians of cool have always had a vested interest in elevating the discarded, lowbrow thrills of the past. The Beatles dug music hall and Ogden Nash; The Ramones treasured bubblegum pop; Quentin Tarantino sold the '90s on '70s kitsch by reconfiguring grindhouse dreck for the arthouse snobs. Surely as the members of every generation will reject the ideals and values of their parents, they will also raid storage closets and attics, looking for forgotten record collections and clothes that would otherwise be donated to Goodwill. Nothing old is ever truly new again — but in the right hands, it can be restored to its previous levels of badassness. But can it ever exceed those levels? And will it ever be praised for anything other than its badassness? In terms of The House That Dirt Built — the second full-length by UK quartet The Heavy — and its updates of such crate-digger touchstones as heavy, horn-powered R&B, Spaghetti Western soundtracks, and the voodoo stomp of Screamin' Jay Hawkins (who, it is required by crate-digger law to note, was a wild man, so bug off), the answer to both questions is an unfortunate "No." Not as if that's anything to hold against the band — it's just a bummer to hear a group with such an ear for hooks aspire to little more than homage. It's telling that The House That Dirt Built's opening track is an audio sample from the trailer for 1980's Don't Go In The House, a Psycho-aping example of a cinematic subgenre (splatter film) that delights in engaging viewers in games of "this thing is like that thing." Nearly every other track on the record plays a musical variation on those games, but the songs that truly stick are the ones where the reference points are less obvious—the gatecrashing garage-soul number "Oh No! Not You Again!" or the sloshed lament "Long Way From Home", for example. Similarly, the chameleon-like voice of frontman Kelvin Swaby is better served without "Cause For Alarm"'s affected patois or the Cee-Lo-esque reediness it picks up on the dusty road to "Short Change Hero". (He wisely avoids accompanying the "I Put A Spell On You" lifts in "Sixteen" with the grave-rattling howls of Screamin' Jay, however.) That said, like a trip to the midnight movies, there's a lot of dumb fun to be had amongst all of The House That Dirt Built's derivativeness. Nowhere is that clearer than within the interlocking grooves of "How You Like Me Now," which may only be James Brown by way of Mark Ronson, but the nervous jangle of guitarist Dan Taylor's Les Paul refuses to be denied. Delivered directly to the camera, Swaby's offhand recitation of the song's title could be seen as a challenge to anyone who hears The House That Dirt Built as eleven tracks of pastiche. If that's so, he probably could have done better than an old Kool Moe Dee hook. Recommended tracks: "Oh No! Not You Again!", "Long Way From Home", "How You Like Me Now" -Erik Adams