Album Review: TV Smith - "Lockdown Holiday"

 

If 2020 is going to be remembered for anything musically, it's the "recorded during lockdown" album - a collection of heart-on-sleeve songs often written with just a sparse acoustic guitar for accompaniment. And it's not really a surprise to see TV Smith, always a man with an ability to cast an acerbic eye over the current political climate dating right back to his days fronting the Adverts in the punk era, adding his effort to this particular list.

As the name suggests, Lockdown Holiday was written by Smith while isolating and ill and the themes cover the bewildering events of the last year. While Bounce Back offers a message of hope to those struggling to cope with the isolation and confusion, the vast majority of songs here contain his trademark righteous fury against ignorant politicians both over here (I Surf The Second Wave, Let's Go Back To The Good Old Days) and across the pond (Send In The Clown) and those who allow them to get away with such heinous acts of carelessness (Fake News, Join The Mainstream).

Quite simply, this is Smith at his heart-on-sleeve best and is an angry denunciation of the state we've allowed our world to get into. While it comes across as confused and angry rather than offering any answers to the crisis (I mean, do any of us know that?), it does at least offer a comforting arm around the shoulder that there are others out there suffering as well and that maybe, just maybe, one day we can put this all behind us and maybe start building a better world if we ever get round to a situation where people can just identify who their real enemies are. Well, we can all dream, right?...

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A brief return from the dead...

Image
  Yup, we're back. Don't all get excited at once. I’d been toying with the idea of doing an end of year list again this year and after a lot of umming and aahing eventually decided to go for it. As with last year, inevitably there were bumps along the way. As of the start of December, I thought this list would be around 40 albums but inevitably reading other people’s lists pointed me towards a bunch of stuff that had passed me by earlier in the year. Plus of course there’s always a few teasing buggers who put stuff out at the last possible moment. So 40 became 50 which became 60 which finally became 70. You lucky people. Actually though, reading through this list, the main thing that strikes me is that I think this might be the most musically varied end of year list that Nite Songs has ever done. From gentle acoustics through acclaimed indie veterans to punk thrash and good old fashioned scuzzy rock ‘n’ roll via some decidedly unexpected diversions (industrial folk music? Check...
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

Garbage Days Revisited #19 - The Dictators - "Go Girl Crazy!" (1975)

Image
  "Set me free, I might know better when I'm older but till then..."  - The Dictators  - Weekend By some distance the oldest album we've featured in this column so far, I very nearly went for the Dictators' 2001 comeback album DFFD  for this feature similar to what I did with the New York Dolls GDR article a couple of weeks back but after a bit of umming and ahhing, I decided it really had to be the group's 1975 debut Go Girl Crazy!  just because it's arguably the great trailblazing US punk album that everyone's forgotten about. I guess that you could almost say that if the Ramones were the Sex Pistols of US punk then the Dictators were kind of like the Eddie & The Hot Rods in that they crashlanded just that one year too early to really reap the punk whirlwind when it took off in 1976-77 but if you listen to Go Girl Crazy! , it's got the fingerprints of a lot of bands who'd come along soon afterwards on it, especially da Bruddas. The big ...
Read more