Drums, guitar, and a semi-brooding voice are the main organs at work in this Vancouver act, but their best attribute is a newfound interest in piano and woodwind instruments. These additions enhance their all-knowing flair for the dramatic ("We'll kick and how we'll scream / 'Til somehow we are freed"), and minimize the shock value behind their crudely provocative takes on romance ("I'm in love with an old gray man / Whose tongue is hot / When the time is right").

Once a duo that was compared to such groups as Ween, the band now bears closer resemblance to Pedro the Lion, or the Vigilantes of Love, though the guitar comes with less sheen, and the lyrics less obvious power. A nonsensical title track ("There's heads on fire / Balls of desire / But I've never been lit like this before") wins you over, all the same, because the group's talent can transcend banalities. The singer's voice can mope to the heavens, and the drumming sprouts the seeds of forgotten fisticuffs.

"Pyrokinesis" closes out the record like a drunken Mekons chant with a rush of metal at the end, but the majority of the disc resembles "To the Grave", which goes giddy over going over-the-top. Here, the band mixes the Lord's Prayer and Lou Reed's "Kill Your Sons" in a whiplash ode to the heroism of failure. I counted about ninety romantic allusions of grandeur effectively worked into the song (among them, "we always live life on the run" and "your heartbeat is one with the road"), and there were another ninety notes which struck so perfectly you just had to forgive and forget their mile-high bullshit quotient. The group's imagined wars and battles of the heart even prove to be a nice respite from the current landscape, where fighting seems to have trumped all aspects of dreaming.

Jerk With a Bomb has very little to say, but that doesn't undermine their music. Their feigned torrents of emotion ("Hell won't welcome you home / Unless you put up a fight") will grow on you as much as Big Country's more genuine ones, and they provide ample fodder to anyone who wants to argue that you can have good sound without substance.