Nite Songs

  Carol Hodge is in possession of an impressive musical CV. As well as being keyboard player for Ryan Hamilton & The Harlequin Ghosts and Steve Ignorant from Crass' band, she's also worked with people as varied as Ginger Wildheart and the Membranes. Savage Purge is Carol's second album following on from 2018's Hold On To That Flame . Similar to its predecessor, it definitely owes a nod to Tori Amos in its sound with the downbeat piano-led laments of Stop Worrying Baby and the gentle Waving Not Drowning definitely hitting the mark musically. The defiant I Still Love Me and the angular Magic Bullet see her upping the tempo to good effect though and show that she isn't afraid to vary her sound up a bit where necessary as evidenced by the ultra-stark domestic violence lament In Case Of Emergency . Send Me Someone and Semi-Colon are similarly stripped down and brutally honest and are good testament to Hodge's ability as a songwriter before the epic five-mi...

  Formed midway through the last decade by Girlschool guitarist Jax Chambers, Syteria first came to our attention with their 2017 album Rantobot which was an inconsistent but promising set of pop-punk tunes. Since then, they've undergone a slight personnel change with bassist Keira Kenworthy leaving to join Joanovarc and being replaced by Steph Dawson. Similar to the Donnas or the Amorettes, Syteria peddle a straight-up brand of glammed up pop-punk albeit with more of a social conscience as evidenced on the likes of Make Some Noise and the environmental protest song  Goodbye World . Musically, they're impressively solid with frontwoman Julia commanding things with her vocals alternating between a purr and a snarl in the best Pat Benatar style while Jax, Steph and drummer Pablo keep things impressively tight musically behind her. The production here is very slick and makes them sound more like a 21st century Sweet or Mud than anything else. Good in some ways but at times you ...

  Now here's a blast from the past. Ignoring the obvious Fatboy Slim remix, Cornershop were a band who I kind of drifted in and out of listening to back in the day, first becoming aware of them as an angry punk band thrown in with the riotgrrl scene with their right-on diatribes about racism in the early '90s, laying into BNP boneheads and idiotic apologists like Morrissey with righteous abandon before resurfacing with the eclectic but rather wonderful When I Was Born For The 7th Time  which begat their mega-hit Brimful of Asha . Thereafter though, they went rather quiet - I was aware of the follow-up Handcream For A Generation  but wasn't exactly blown away by the lead off single Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III  and kind of drifted away from them. Now, a decade and a half later, here we are with Tijinder and Ben's first album in well over half a decade. And it's one of the more pleasant surprises of 2020 so far. What Cornershop have done here essentially ...

  Ah, the rituals of life. Morning breaks, birds sing, the Supersuckers release a new album of scuzzed up rock 'n' roll, all is right with the world again... Now on no less than their eleventh album, Play That Rock 'n' Roll sees Tuscon's finest playing things fairly obvious even by their standards - opening track Ain't Gonna Stop (Until I Stop It)  is basically Prime Mover  by Zodiac Mindwarp rearranged slightly while elsewhere there's hints of everyone from the glam swagger of Bowie ( You Ain't The Boss Of Me ) through the rockabilly strut of the Stray Cats (the title track) to the glam stomp of Mud ( That's A Thing  basically IS  Tiger Feet  with slightly different words). So why does it still sound as infectiously brill as it always does then? Well, basically the Supersuckers are just damn good at what they do and the Lemmy style blast of Bringin' It Back ,  Last Time Again and the snarling Die Alone  are fine songs indeed while the swaggering...

  Now the last time I had a group land in my review pile from Australasia who were hyped as the next big thing and played ultra-stripped-down back to basics garage punk, it was New Zealand's Amyl & The Sniffers 12 months ago. And...well, let's say I didn't quite see the hype about it. So given that Aussie garage punks the Chats have arrived here with a similar sort of hype, it's safe to say I was a bit cynical going into listening to this one. Hold the front page though because High Risk Behaviour  is...well, it's alright actually. Sounding like Dirt Box Disco relocated to a particularly grotty Sunshine Coast neighbourhood and stripped down to the basics sonically, the Chats aren't big or clever but there's something at least enjoyable about their ultra-knucklehead take on garage punk - all three chord rampaging and songs about booze ( Drunk And Disorderly ), drugs ( The Kids Need Guns ), STD's ( The Clap ), being skint ( Pub Feed ) and getting beate...

  Well, here we go, part 2 of this month's Singles Bar as we finish rounding up all the good stuff that's landed in my inbox over the last few months while I was in reviewing hibernation. Hopefully everyone will find at least something they like in here! Cheers again and hopefully we'll see you with the next instalment either next month or in November depending on how much stuff lands in my inbox between now and then! Starting off with a band who I'm friends with from my days living on the Herts/Essex borders, Touch of Blue  reformed a couple of years ago and "Here It Goes"  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑), their new single, is a good slice of low-slung and loose Stonesy rock with a slight nod to the bar-room stomp of the Quireboys as well. If you're looking for something nice and simple to sink a pint to this coming Friday night then you could do a lot worse than this - downloadable from their Bandcamp page (along with a couple of other recent re-releases) if you want to i...

Another new feature! I know, who'd have thunk it eh? Anyway, there was a time when any self-respecting music mag would have a singles review section every week but, let's be honest, those days are pretty much long gone in 2020 with the Top 40 these days being so meaningless and irrelevant that it might as well count for the number of minidiscs you've sold in Outer Mongolia. Nevertheless, there's still plenty of folks who are still stubbornly putting out singles either as stand alone releases or tasters for new albums and, y'know what, fair play to them. It's also fair to say that while I was taking a hibernation from music reviewing stuff there was a lot of singles piling up in my inbox and a lot of it deserved to be given some good press. So the original aim of this column was to kind of clear the decks and point you good people reading this blog towards some top tunes to make the lockdown a bit more bearable. And then I realised just how much of it there was a...

  The Damned were there at the beginning of punk and they're still going now. While the Sex Pistols burned bright before exploding fast and the Clash were effectively finished after five albums (we shall speak not of Cut The Crap  here), the Damned have, via a few splits and reunions, been almost a constant presence on the live circuit for 40 plus years now. When they started out, they were very much the archetypal '77 punk band with chief songwriter Brian James being hugely influenced by the Stooges and their debut album Damned Damned Damned  being a brutally fierce collection of frenetic two minute blasts. However, James' departure following the failure of their second album saw the group reorganise with Captain Sensible, Dave Vanian and Rat Scabies (and subsequently new bassist Paul Gray who joined for 1980's The Black Album ) all starting to come into their own as songwriters and steering the band off in a variety of directions often all at once. The amazing thing i...

The joint brainchild of Wildhearts alumni Willie Dowling and Random Jon Poole, the Dowling Poole have been one of the more interestingly oddball groups to break on to the music scene in recent years. On See You See Me , their third album, it's safe to say that they're not getting any less weird. Or enjoyable for that matter. It starts off in sort-of-familiar territory with the breathless rush of the title track which is the sort of enjoyably oddball alternative rock that the Dowling Poole have excelled at on their previous two albums, 2014's  Bleak Strategies  and 2016's excellent One Hyde Park . However, it rapidly goes even weirder than that with the stuttery electro-rock of The Product  and Hope  which is an almost Prince-style funk workout with falsetto vocals and icy keyboards. Made In Heaven  goes back to the oddball XTC-style indie that the Dowling Poole have done so well in the past with lyrics taking a well-aimed shot at Donald Trump, a man who the DP h...

  Beach Slang seem to have been one of those bands who've been sailing just under my radar for a while now - there's been more than one person who's said to me "Oh, you like the Senseless Things and the Replacements? You'd love these guys!" over the last few years. And so here in 2020 I finally find myself listening to a Beach Slang album. And it's pretty good. Right from the off, Let It Ride  sees them wearing their Westerberg influences on their sleeves as does the Can't Hardly Wait  style horn section on recent single Tommy In The '80s (perhaps tellingly they now have none other than Tommy Stinson on bass for them) but they quickly throw a curveball in as Bam Rang Rang  goes from a supersonic Ramones full throttle blast to suddenly switching to an almost Smoke On The Water  style riff-fest midway through. The one-two of Nobody Say Nothing  and Nowhere Bus  nearby are aching acoustic-led Skyway  style laments but no worse for it. If the one comp...

  The Weird Things first came to this reviewer's attention when I saw them on their home turf at the Croydon Rocks festival a couple of years ago. They were one of the better bands of the weekend and I was suitably impressed to give their debut album Ten Digit Freak  a spin after seeing them - it was a decent effort as well with the group peddling an energetic brand of pop-punk. For their second album, the group have decided to move things on a bit with Code:533  being a kind of semi-concept album with a lot of the songs being based around issues facing young people today such as discrimination against tattooed people ( Inky ), suicide ( Sinner Or Saint , Not Ready ) and heroin abuse ( Thirteen ). It's a brave move but the main problem here is that the group kind of fall between two stools on this one, not quite energetic enough to be a punk band but not quite heavy enough to be a full-on rock band either and it kind of leaves them in a bit of a no man's land. It still ha...

  As you'll probably have noticed by now, most of my previous Songs From The Junkshop entries have referred back to the indie scene of the mid-'90s. Although I'd like to claim that my interest in guitar music started there, it would only really be a half-truth. Even though it bit the bullet fairly quickly after I'd started listening to it thanks to the rise of grunge (maybe another reason I never really got into the whole Seattle thing? I dunno), glam metal also played a part in shaping my nascent music taste in my early teens. The likes of Guns 'n' Roses, AC/DC, WASP, Skid Row, the Almighty and, slightly later, Love/Hate and the Quireboys, all played a part in my growing love of loud guitars and attitude but there was one band above all others who I quickly developed a love of after first hearing them on the ITV Chart Show as an 11-year-old. Ladies and gentlemen, the Dogs D'Amour... The video in question was for the band's Victims of Success  single whi...

  Janus Stark were one of those bands I was sort-of-aware-of in the late '90s and early noughties and I'm pretty sure I must have seen them a couple of times supporting other Britrock bands I was a fan of around this time (I have a memory of them opening for the Wildhearts on one tour but I can't for the life of me remember where - it may have been a Ginger solo gig or maybe Silver Ginger 5? Anyway, I digress). Headed up by Giz Butt who's also played live guitar for the Prodigy, the original line up split in the early noughties with drummer Pinch (who'd served his apprenticeship with Giz in the English Dogs back in the '80s) going on to join the Damned and Giz putting together thrash metallers The More I See. Recent years have seen Giz reforming the band though aided and abetted by fellow guitarist Richard Gombault formerly of fellow Peterborough natives and one of Britpop's most criminally under-rated bands Midget. Now signed to the UK Subs' Time & ...

  Well, after the Sounds From The Junkshop feature I did on them the other week, it would have seemed a bit remiss not to give the new Wonder Stuff album a listen so here you go. This is the Stuffies' fifth album since they reformed twenty (!) years ago and no less than Miles Hunt and co's ninth album overall. The intervening years since 2016's "30 Goes Around The Sun" have seen a few line-up changes with the return of long time guitarist Malc Treece and ex-Clash/Eat drummer Pete Howard (who previously played with Hunt in his mid-'90s post-grunge outfit Vent 414) along with ex-Mission (and several others) guitarist Mark Gemini Thwaite on bass. Similar to its predecessor, Better Being Lucky  is the sound of a more downbeat Wonder Stuff than those who know them solely for their '90s output will remember and I'll admit this one took me a few listens to get into but I'm happy to say that it's well worth persevering with. The brooding Feet To The Fl...