Album Review: Rossall - "The Last Glam In Town"

 

John Rossall is probably best known as the musical leader of the Glitter Band way back in the '70s (for those unaware, the band actually had a whole separate music career away from their disgraced singer and chalked up a fair few hits on their own). Last Glam In Town sees him making a comeback with an impressive backing case including John Robb (Membranes/Goldblade) and various members of '80s indie stalwarts the Nightingales who comprise his backing band nowadays.

If you're expecting some flat trip down Memory Lane here then prepare to be surprised - this is very much the '70s glam sound but much as Joe Elliott and the Quireboys did in their Down 'n' Outz side project, it gives the formula a much-needed 21st century makeover. Opener Fear of a Glam Planet uses Robb's sinister whispered vocals to create something that owes as much to imperial phase Marilyn Manson as it does to Marc Bolan and it's not a bad sound at all.

Elsewhere, Neon Lights, featuring another vocal turn from Robb, takes things into an almost power-pop territory with its icy guitars and rumbling bassline and sounds genuinely unique like some great collision between the Cure and Berlin-era Bowie given a pop makeover while Blackpool Rocks could almost be the lean mean new wave sound of Valley of the Dolls era Generation X if you squint a bit.

If Go Go Girl, Glitterbomb and a stomping cover of the Honeycombs' Have I The Right? (featuring the Nightingales' Robert Lloyd taking vocal duties) are a bit more easily identifiable as the classic glam rock template, they're done with such enthusiasm and tightness that you can't help but enjoy them. Equaliser, co-written by the late Alan Merrill of the Arrows, is another highlight with its driving riff and honking sax powering it along.

I was pleasantly surprised by this album - Rossall is evidently anything but a guy trading on past glories and Last Glam In Town really does take the classic glam rock sound and well and truly drag it into 2020 to good effect. Give it a spin (stream or download) over at the Rossall Bandcamp page and see for yourself - you might just be pleasantly surprised.

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