Album Review: Helen Love - "Power On"

 

Every scene needs its clown prince/princess band to take the rip out of it. Just as the Television Personalities were to punk rock, so Helen Love were to Britpop, gently ripping the piss out of it with some of the catchiest tunes you've probably ever heard from a lo-fi band. 25 years later and they're still very much out there bringing a ray of cheery sunshine to those who need it as evidenced right from opener Hold Your Hand which references both Top of the Pops and Timbuk 3's The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades. When the bubblegum-pop of Debbie Take Control of the Stereo bursts in with a supremely cheeky sample of Elvis Costello's Pump It Up, you can't help but find yourself grinning.

Quite simply, in depressing times such as these it seems we arguably need Helen Love as much as we ever have done and Power On is definitely a tonic for anyone who needs cheering up. From the Ramones style pop-punk of Jackie From The Estate and Dead In My Head through the high energy disco of Power On The Music (which must be the only song in the world to sample the Super Furry Animals and Kiss in the space of 20 seconds!) to the pure sunshine pop of Sandra Dee.

Power On simply does everything you'd want a Helen Love album to do in that no matter how terrible a day you've just had, its sheer unbridled cheerfulness will put a smile on your face just like all the best bubblegum power-disco-pop-punk should. Add in the same spiky punk energy they've already had and you're on to a winner here. You can stream or download it from their label Alcopop Records' Bandcamp site.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

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