I am more rock ‘n’ roll than the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. And I don’t drive a motorcycle. Black rebels? No. This band is a bunch of white posers, and their new album, “Howl,” is a blueprint of blase pretentiousness and jukebox songwriting.

It does nothing for the listener. Like Perry Como, Pat Boone or Buck Owens before it, it is the kind of crap your parents listen to while they drink gin and pretend to be happy with each another. It is fake music for the living dead.

The band is too handsome and its record company has way too much money for this album to ever amount to what Black Rebel Motorcycle Club wants it to be – something right up there with Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” Velvet Underground’s “Fully Loaded,” et cetera.

They jack the cover art from every early Velvet Underground album and try to cop the legitimacy of Alan Ginsberg. They become little more than the ingenious marketing plastered all over the record. They fail because they are the Urban Outfitters of music. Albums like this one are killing rock ‘n’ roll.

I know this is a record review and that in a record review the writer is generally supposed to talk about the music. But there is no real music here; just wizard puppetry and careless shoplifting.