Album Review: The Weird Things - "Code:533"

 


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 has its moments - Time For You To Go is an amusing tale of one night stands gone wrong once the beer goggles wear off while the laid back menace of Leave Me Alone and the seasick grungy stylings of the aforementioned Thirteen are good as well. But for every track like that, there's something which doesn't quite hit the mark such as Why?, Bubblegum Head and Dirty Boys, some of which aren't helped by the lyrics being absolute howlers as well.

A bit hit and miss all told although it's not a terrible effort. The Weird Things just need to find a bit more of a punch with their next one I think...

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌓🌓🌓🌓🌓🌓🌑🌑🌑🌑 (6/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

Image
  "You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?"  - Silverfish  - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split.  I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth  and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

Image
  "I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..."  - The Quireboys  - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was  aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You  on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled  on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
Read more