Album Review: Spunk Volcano & The Eruptions - "Barry Milner Is Thick"

 

There are times in life when you want an album that'll genuinely challenge your senses, that'll take you to a higher plane of musical consciousness and genuinely open your mind to see things as you've never seen them before. And then there are times when you just think "nah, sod that" and want to put something simple, straightforward and catchy (and ideally as foul-mouthed as possible) to sing and swear along to. And that's where Spunk Volcano & The Eruptions come in.

Now on their fifth album, the group's last album Double Bastard was a good effort which only slightly came undone via its sheer length at 25 songs making it a bit much to get through in one go. However, from the sheer power pop rush of opener Broken Hearts Make Better Songs and excellent former single Football In The Sun (Ossie Ardiles), you can tell that this is gonna be a good 'un.

Essentially you can divide Barry Milner Is Thick almost exactly in half. On the one hand, there's the trademark fast-paced punk anger that we're used to the Eruptions coming up with on the likes of Hard As Nails and Swiss Army Dickhead while on the other, there's a new more melodic almost power-pop side coming out (albeit with all the enjoyable foul-mouthedness of yore present and correct) on Soldier On and former single Tomorrow's Promises. It's a tricky tightrope to walk but fair play to Spunk and the lads, they manage it with minimal fuss and in doing so they might just have come up with their strongest effort to date. Hell, they even manage to come up with a surprisingly tender ballad to close the album in Caving In (although it does kick in with the guitars and drums halfway through) and carry it off well which is something I never thought I'd say about this lot.

It's certainly the Eruptions’ most varied effort to date and shows this band are growing in confidence all the time with the band swinging with consummate ease from the full on pop rush of Looking For Something to the sheer vitriol of This Is Fucking Shit. Guaranteed to keep existing Eruptions fans happy, if there's any justice then Barry Milner Is Thick will hopefully also bring Spunk and his crew a whole load of new converts on board. Recommended.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑 (9/10)

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