Nite Songs

  Lauren Tate is best known for her day job fronting Barnsley's answer to Babes in Toyland, Hands Off Gretel and it has to be said she's one of the more charismatic punk singers on the circuit today, never shy of standing up to lazy cliches and bullies and with a good line in thoughtful and angry lyrics as well. So the prospect of a solo album from her is certainly a pretty intriguing one. I'm happy to report though that Songs For Sad Girls  is generally pretty decent. HOG are a band who definitely aren't afraid to let their angst and venom run at full tilt on their albums and the fact that there are songs on here dedicated to self-harm ( Miss America Perfect Body ), neglectful parents ( What About The Kids ) and abusive relationships ( Can't Keep My Hands Off You ) all within the first few songs. Musically, this album is more varied than you might at first think from the poppy He Loves Me  and the Ronettes-style harmonies of Naturally Born Bad  to the vitriolic...

Okay so this instalment of Sounds From The Junkshop is likely to need a little bit of prior clarification. It's not that the Wonder Stuff are exactly an unknown band but they seem to be a band cursed where their two big hits, the omnipresent Size of a Cow and their Vic Reeves collaboration Dizzy seem to be the first thing people think of. For this episode of SFTJ though, we're taking a trip down a road less travelled to revisit an album that's generally regarded as the runt of the litter when it comes to the group's first run and was fairly swiftly disowned by the band at the time but ended up being one of my favourites and an album I've frequently revisited down the years. I refer of course to the band's swansong prior to splitting, Construction For The Modern Idiot . I was aware of the Wonder Stuff before then obviously - I remember the excellent Don't Let Me Down Gently  being on Top of the Pops a few years before and buying it from the local Woolworths...

  Tensheds is the solo career alter ego of Jim Jones & The Righteous Mind keyboard player Matt Millership and Deathrow Disco is no less than his fifth solo album. It’s an intriguing and enjoyable beast as well which shows off the guy's versatility as a musician to good effect. The sheer scope of this album could easily have been a disaster in the wrong hands but it’s to the immense credit of Millership and his co-accused here that they manage to pull something pretty damn good out of the hat here. Opener Youngbloods sees Millership going full Ray Manzarek with a screeching keyboard solo that almost sounds like guitars before taking it to a whole new level on Gold Tooth  and Sharp Threads  which sounds like a couple of rolling blues rock numbers with Millership replacing the guitar parts with his keyboard playing. A tricky one to pull off and he deserves a lot of credit for doing so. There's plenty of other highlights here as well from the the panicky  Black Blo...

Oh I can hear you now - "Bluddyell, he really has lost the plot this time, David flippin' Hasselhoff?" Allow me to explain -the prospect of the Hoff doing a covers album may be the sort of thing that sounds more like it belongs in Novelty Records Monthly  rather than Nite Songs  but looking at the choices of bands covered here, this is definitely not yer standard "actor doing a bunch of '70s pop standards" territory. Whitesnake? Echo and the Bunnymen? Modern English? Lords of the New Church? The Jesus & Mary Chain? Okay, I give in, you got me intrigued, let's investigate. The surprising thing is that Hoff actually doesn't do too bad a job here. Backed up by a guest list including Steve Stevens, James Williamson, Tracii Guns, Todd Rundgren, A Flock of Seagulls and Ministry of all people (c'mon, try and tell me that the Hoff and Al Jourgensen teaming up to cover Sweet Caroline  doesn't at least vaguely intrigue you), he treats the songs wit...

When I first started working on the Sounds from the Junkshop feature for this blog, the plan was to try and keep these stories in chronological order but, because there's an obvious lead-on from last week's column, I'm going to take a quick step away from the days of 1992 indie for a moment here to write about my favourite band, the Wildhearts. A lot (and I mean like a lot ) has been written in print about Ginger and co down the years and I guess it proves just how much this band mean to so many people - while I'm here, for those who haven't already, give Gary Davidson's excellent Zealot in Wonderland book a read. As with the columns on Carter and the Senseless Things, this is more designed to be one fan's story of the rollercoaster this band's taken them on down the years. However, because unlike the aforementioned, the Wildhearts have been a steady and active presence in my musical life for a quarter of a century now, it's also unlikely I'm go...

  "So this is what they mean when they talk about freedom"  intones Doctors of Madness frontman Richard Strange on opening track So Many Ways To Hurt You . From the sound of his voice and the lyrics which paint a brutal but depressingly spot-on picture of a 1984  style surveillance state where tyrannical politicians and slavering tabloid press journalists are forever looking for big mouthed dissidents to brutally knock down and victimise so they can make an example of them, I would say he's somewhat less than convinced... There's a lot of bands through history who have been cursed by breaking on to the scene at precisely the wrong time but Doctors of Madness really were desperately unlucky to emerge blinking into the sunlight when they did in 1975, a bit of a nothing year for music to put it mildly. Three years earlier and they'd have been perfectly positioned to ride in Bowie and Roxy Music's jetstream, three years later they'd have fit in perfectly with ...

  Mainstays of the Leeds rock scene, the Kingcrows are now on their fourth album and Brute Force And Ignorance  is pretty much a straight continuation from where its predecessor, 2015's Funland , left off. These guys have one foot planted in New York some time in the late '70s knocking back Jack Daniels with the Ramones and the Dictators at CBGB's and the other planted in Soho circa 1986 downing a pint with the Babysitters and Marionette at Gossip's. In other words, it's all frenetic three chord breathlessness, tightwire riffs, gang chant choruses and odes to life on the road ( Blood Brothers , Bum Notes And Feedback , My Heart My Life , Saturday Night Rock City ) with the odd deviation from the formula to keep things fresh such as the Sweet style glam stomp of City Kids  and the Vince Taylor tribute Car Crash Cadillac . Sure, it's nothing you won't expect if you've heard any of the Kingcrows' previous releases but sometimes there's a good argume...

Looking back while digging through my memories for this column, I don't think I'd quite realised just how important a musical month January 1992 was to my musical tastes developing. As someone living in sleepy suburban Leeds who was just about to turn 13, I was still at this point reliant on listening to the Top 40 on Radio 1 and watching Top of the Pops on a Thursday evening and the ITV Chart Show on a Saturday lunchtime for my musical intake. This meant that the stuff that reached my ears was largely dependant on what was in the charts (and in the to a lesser extent the Indie and Rock Top 10's on the Chart Show - even at that age, I'd already worked out that that's where most of the exciting music was even if I was very unlikely to encounter most of it in the local Woolies) rather than anything I was reading in the music papers like NME, Melody Maker and Kerrang, all of which I was still a good year or two away from discovering. Nevertheless, the episode of Top of...

Now obviously Phil Campbell deserves eternal respect for the riffs he contributed to Motorhead for thirty plus years but his debut album with his new band the Bastard Sons last year ( The Age Of Absurdity ) was a nondescript mainstream-metal-by-numbers effort and really made me think that without Lemmy he was destined to sink. However, I’m pleased to report that Old Lions Still Roar , a collaborative effort between the Bastard Sons and various guest vocalists is a definite step up and arguably what they should have aimed for in the first place. Apart from a couple of dull acoustic-led numbers which you can safely skip ( Rocking Chair and Left For Dead ) plus a number featuring Benji from Skindred which could've been awesome but just drags ( Dead Roses - what is it with Benj at the mo, the last Skindred album was bobbins as well! C'mon dude, sort it out, we're relying on ya!), this is generally pretty solid and enjoyable stuff. With tracks featuring vocal contributions f...

Quite honestly, the prospect of a new album from  Aussie Acca-Dacca copyists Airbourne  is something that I'd normally look forward to with all the enthusiasm of being told I've got to drink a soup tureen full of stale piss. After blasting on the scene with a supremely confident debut in 2008’s Runnin’ Wild , the law of diminishing returns well and truly whacked this band with a vengeance to the extent that when I reviewed 2017’s turgid  Breakin’ Outta Hell , I suggested that it was the sound of a band flat out of ideas who’d pretty much shot their full load on their debut. But...and I can't quite believe I'm saying this... Boneshaker   is actually...okay? Even quite good in places actually. Maybe it's the fact that the last two albums from this lot were so dreadful but this is at least a step back in the right direction although obviously not in the same league as Runnin' Wild etc. Sure, it still sounds like an AC/DC rip-off but at least this time it's a h...

Confession - this isn't the first time I've done this. In fact it isn't even the second. I originally did a history of Alice Cooper's albums way back when I wrote for the short-lived Sinzine  website a decade or so ago and then revisited and updated it for my previous blog a couple of years back. Both of them were pretty extensive exercises as you'd expect from a man with as extensive a back catalogue as Alice has and both very nearly sent me a bit doo-lally if I'm honest. So, possibly because I'm a sucker for punishment but also because the Coop has done a couple of albums since that last feature (one on his own and one with his supergroup the Hollywood Vampires), I've done an Alice albums guide again. Let's be honest, the Dark Lord of Shock Rock is a guy who needs no introduction, a real mainstay of the music scene and the man who can arguably claim to have had a hand in the invention of both punk and goth. But, like an evil version of David Bowie,...