I hope that when I grow up I can be just like God. Hell, I hope I can inherit the crazy old coot's job when he retires. Now that would be a sweet gig. I bet He never has to pay for dinner. People always offering to pick up the check just to get on His good side. Man, how would it be? It's settled: when I grow up, I'm going to be God. But, for now, I'm just happy being down with his family.

It seems like a gaggle of British guys and one Yank (or at least a guy who lives in New York and runs an underground shop called Center for the Dull) are happy that way, too. So happy that they've named a band after the Almighty's Posse and kept it real with an album called We Are the World. It's not quite a religious experience. Come to think of it, it's not even that spiritual. But it does try to be transcendent. New Wavers will recognize co-founder Adam Peters as the keyboardist from Echo and the Bunnymen (the other co-founder is Chris Brick, the aforementioned Dull Yank). They have a few fans here and there, and the melodramatic posturing of some of these songs is sure to raise some of those burnouts from their '80s graves.

Even more will be drawn from the Legendary Pink Dots pace and tone combined with Samuel Beckett- ish literary psychedelia. If you don't get it, you won't get it. Here's a sample: "Where the truth is/ We don't want to go/ So we stay there/ Nice and slow/ Doing the same thing/ Every day/ Makes you clever/ In only one way/ That's real stupid/ Wouldn't you say?" If that's not enough of a road sign for you, pay attention to warning inside the sleeve: "The word is not the thing." Neither is the joke, obviously. Family of God would like you to think that they're as clever as their riddles. They're not. But they are at least entertaining.

The swaggering synthesizers and deep echoes of "Our Permission" come across as the deadpan flipside of Pink Floyd's The Wall. "Help, I'm a Rock" combines good- vibe Mod harmonies with goofy shouts a la Two- Tone Ska, all with the help of sessions- man extraordinaire Eric Schermerhorn (Tin Machine, The The, They Might Be Giants) on guitar and the Flamin' Groovies' Chris Wilson on bass. "Follow the Lights" gets back to Echo and the Bunnymen's dramatic core thanks to the addition of Bunnyman Will Seargant on guitar. But the Family does best when it heeds its own advice about the word not being the thing. "The Observer is Observed" is an instrumental ambient track that loses the irony and glides along seamlessly for almost 13 minutes.

In case you haven't guessed, We Are the World is an Anglophile's wet dream. There's so much Brit in these songs that you'll be pulling kidney pie out of your ears for days after listening. And as far as I can tell, there's very little mention of God (aside from "Beautiful People") in the whole thing, which makes me wonder if they're just trying to capitalize off the big man's commercial viability, or if it's just more of that satire that the kids seem to love so much.

-Shan Fowler