CALL it bravery, call it stupidity, but letting a dozen angst-ridden American indie-punk gunslingers loose on The Smiths' back catalogue is certainly an ambitious exercise.

Proclaimed by many as our greatest band, the Morrissey/Marr partnership left a formidable footprint on the musical landscape.

Marr's deft, elegant compositions and Morrissey's bleakly comic paeans to doomed romance left critics hyperventilating.

So how do you celebrate this genius?

Aptly-titled Sore Point Records have allowed testosterone-heavy college rockers to chainsaw their way through some of the rock canon's most sensitive, subtle, intelligent and damn near indispensable songs.

A few seconds of rumbling distortion - surely not waspish Moz grumbling early disapproval? - precede the opener: Million Dead's lame rendition of Girlfriend In A Coma. Painfully slow, devoid of the charm that made the original sparkle with a jaunty wit, this sets the tone for an album already crying collectors' novelty.

One of the main problems, cutting through the album as devastatingly as a cynical Morrissey sideswipe, is the vocals. From Cursive's four-letter Frankly Mr Shankly, Read Yellow's Big Mouth Strikes Again to the blackboard scrape, tuneless kebab shop nadir of My Awesome Compilation's There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, nobody comes close to matching Morrissey's wicked nonchalance.

A few boldly try, notably Garrison's stomping Panic and Walter Walter's sprightly Ask. It is also worth checking out audacious versions of haunting Smiths' classics Death Of A Disco Dancer and Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, revived by YourCodeNameIs:Milo and Instruction from the dying Strangeways embers of their career.

Motives may be admirable but the bulk of these angry versions just don't sit snugly with the Smiths' legacy. They merely send you scurrying back to the originals, a fiercely intelligent legacy that barely requires a library whisper of promotion.

Morrissey may be thriving in LA, but he knows his Stretford from Seattle, Deansgate from Denver - and he definitely knows not to let pesky Uncle Sam near the most quintessentially British of bands.

They just haven't earned it yet, baby...

Updated: 09:41 Thursday, August 05, 2004