What's the point of rock music? Besides the hype, the fame, and all the trappings of the "shallow money trench" from that Hunter S. Thompson line we quote from here on TLOBF, what is its purpose? I ask the question in this particular review not because the debut album by Brighton band The Perils is neccesarily a towering piece of rock history-to-be - though as we'll see, it is rather good - but just because that question happens to be on my mind right now, and because Good People Do Bad Things is my current muse. This album is an impressive and enjoyable listen because it captures the excitement, energy and emotion of its twelve songs on record, which is as close to a concrete mission statement for the genre that I can confidently identify.This album isn't rock as a force for good, or rock as art, it's just a solid, earnest, and often thrilling record. And whilst it isn't original, it achieves the surprisingly difficult feat of stringing a consistent album together, without relying too heavily on too few songs and merely padding out the rest of the running time with better-produced demos originally scrawled on cheap cafe napkins. That's not to say there aren't stand out songs here - upbeat, fast-paced singalong "Lipstick Sister", immediately followed by the coruscating "The River" provides a particularly impacting one-two punch in the middle of the record. The sheer menace exuded by the guitars on the latter, juxtaposed with a gripping solo and a stop-start, pounding structure makes it as engaging a rock song as I've heard in 2009 thus far.There are plenty more similarly-built songs before and after that pair, but rather than repeating themselves too often, the band have seen fit to also include some texturally different works as well - there's the affectionate "Prize Lane", the more laid-back "Cigarette Song" and the largely acoustic closer "The Highway" which delivers its sentimentality through a vector of resigned defeatism, ending the album on a slightly melancholic note but creating a stark contrast with the riff-heavy nature of much of the rest of the record.The album never seems to give a lot of exposition or explanation for its enigmatic title - such lofty themes are rarely dealt with so bluntly - but there's no doubting that when it comes to to The Perils, talented people have done good things. What more can you ask? 84%The Perils on MySpace