Nite Songs

  Without wanting to sound too over-dramatic, this really is put up or shut up time for everyone's favourite Darkness soundalikes from LA via Derby. Now on their third album, their debut, 2014's  Everybody Wants  was the sound of a band where there was plenty of promise who could kick loose to good effect live but seemed a little bit hemmed in by an over-reliance on studio trickery. The route forward should have been obvious but for reasons best known to themselves (or perhaps their record label), they instead slammed firmly into reverse gear for 2018's Young And Dangerous , an album so over-produced that it saw the band's sound horribly blunted and, a couple of moments where the tunes packed the muscle to punch through the over-zealous studio sheen aside, sunk in a morass of gloopy synths and ham-fisted superfluous orchestral effects. So, have they turned it around at this belated juncture or is this a case of the group drifting beyond the point of no return? The prosp...

  "Open the door and let the light in..."  - Silver Sun -   Golden Skin , 1996 On October 30th, I received some news which hit hard - James Broad, frontman with one of my favourite bands from my late teenage years Silver Sun, had passed away following a battle with cancer. At the time I was midway through writing an earlier SFTJ column about Mega City Four and reflecting on how Wiz's passing in 2006 came as such a shock to me so to hear this news definitely felt a bit eerie. Fast forward three months or so and as I'm midway through writing this SFTJ column about Silver Sun, I received the horrible news that Mark Keds, frontman with the Senseless Things ( who I've also covered on SFTJ in the past and were one of the first guitar bands I got into - Mark was also the catalyst for me discovering the Wildhearts and starting my lifelong fandom of them when he briefly joined the group after the Things split up) had suddenly passed away. Again, this has been a real shoc...

  It's certainly true to say that the current political climate is ripe for a Jello Biafra album. Tea Party Revenge Porn  was due to come out this month but due to the elections across the pond, Jello pushed it forward a few weeks. Given the terrifying events in Washington in recent weeks, one wonders if there's a follow-up EP in the works as we speak... Whatever the situation, it's clear right from the anti-Trump diatribe Satan's Combover that Biafra is on good form here with his references to "Making racism great again" and the Holiday in Cambodia style scream of "TWEET! LIE! TWEET! LIE!" towards the end. While many of Biafra's contemporaries have either grown old and toothless by bowing their heads before the marketing Mammons (John Lydon, Iggy Pop) or are simply gone from this world (Joe Strummer, the Ramones), Jello is still out there raging with, if anything, even more fury than when he first burst on to the scene as the '70s turned...

  Some albums just suffer from landing on the review desk at precisely the wrong moment. Boston's Muck & The Mires are signed to garage rock specialists Dirty Water records (who also count the likes of Lucy & The Rats, King Salami & The Cumberland Three and MFC Chicken among their roster), and as you might expect, they're another group owing a big debt in their sound to the original '60s garage rock explosion. The trouble is, as you'll know if you've been reading this site a lot in the last few weeks, we seem to have had quite a lot of albums like this going through our review pile in recent months and there've been quite a few absolute diamonds in there such as the recent efforts from the Empty Hearts, the Dirty Strangers and Baby Shakes. And it's not that there's anything massively wrong with Greetings From Muckingham Palace , it's just that it's found itself among some pretty fierce competition with the company it's had to keep...

  Matty James Cassidy has certainly been a busy man with this being his second album of 2020 ( Old Souls , which we reviewed a couple of months back, being the other). As the title suggests, this is another of that staple of 2020, the lockdown album with Cassidy having written and recorded the tracks during the first enforced isolation period last spring. With Cassidy and co-conspirator Gary Pennick playing all the instruments themselves here, songs such as Dangerous To Myself  which looks at the strange limbo of lockdown life and the desolate Stop Cryin' (It's Only The End Of The World) are very much tunes of their time while song titles such as Uncertain Times  and Lonely Kind  pretty much say it all. The key is that similar to his some time collaborator Tyla J Pallas, Cassidy is simply a guy with a good ear for a heartfelt lyric and a good tune and he has a good voice to carry these songs off. While it's safe to say that if you're suffering from overkill of albums...

  So here's a bit of a special feature in the Sounds From The Junkshop series. While writing the first twenty or so entries in the series, it's often occurred to me while retracing the musical steps of my youth that there were a few bands who were deserving of an honorary mention in these flashbacks but hadn't really imprinted themselves on my music taste sufficiently to really warrant a full SFTJ all to themselves. From bands who sort of played around the edge of being in my favourites to ones who put out one absolute blinder of a single only to disappear soon afterwards to those who reeled me in with a decent song only for their album to put me off, these occasional SFTJ round-ups are designed to just fill in a few gaps in the story of my musical journey for anyone who's interested. As we're now well into the Britpop era with the regular SFTJ lookbacks, it sort of made sense to do a look back at those bands who briefly threatened to become favourites of mine in my...

  "So here's to a happy landing, wherever we're fallin' to..."  - Heavy Stereo  - Cartoon Moon , 1996 Let's be honest, it all started to go wrong for Oasis when they started to swallow the "new Beatles" hype wholesale. Well that and when they started developing a worrying predilection for tedious blues jams but that's a whole other story. I blame Paul Weller meself. The thing about Definitely Maybe was, y'see, yes there was definitely a Beatles influence there (I mean on the likes of Live Forever and Up In The Sky you can't really miss it) but there was so much more going on there as well. On that one, the Gallaghers owed arguably more to the '70s glam stomp of T-Rex and Slade ( Cigarettes and Alcohol for the former, Rock 'n' Roll Star for the latter) or the scuzzy sneer of the Pistols ( Bring It On Down ) than they did to the Fab Four. Their critics may have derided them as such but a Lennon & McCartney tribute band ...

  Featuring the talents of Rat Scabies on drums and former Adam & The Ants bassist Chris Constantinou, both last seen hooking up together in the Mutants, One Thousand Motels see the pair eschewing the guest stars approach of the three Mutants albums for a more back-to-basics approach. There's a weird fuzzy psychedelic sort of vibe to this album which reminds me of Queens of the Stone Age (though thankfully the version before Josh Homme got drunk on his own armpit stench and they didn’t so much jump the shark as do a triple pike with somersault over it) more than anything. I can also hear Screamadelica  era Primal Scream on the tripped out likes of Definition  and the vocals on the laid-back Gone  and Gerry's Ashes  could almost be Andrew Eldritch after an overdose on Horlicks. It's maybe telling though that One Thousand Motels sound at their best when they inject a bit of urgency into their sound - the Beatles-y Rain  and Kill Me If You Love me  ar...

  Signed up to power pop specialists Wicked Cool and featuring the talents of Blondie's Clem Burke on drums, the Romantics' Wally Palmar on vocals and the Cars' Elliot Eatson on guitar, the Empty Hearts could certainly lay claim to being something of a power-pop supergroup and, as the title makes clear, this is their seventh album. Just joking. It gets off to an enjoyably exuberant start with Coat Tailer  sounding a bit like a more mellow version of the Dictators' classic Next Big Thing . Days Like These  features none other than Ringo Starr on drums but sounds a bit too safe and mid-paced to really hit home. Thankfully though, the Motown style horns on  Well, Look At You  give it a bit more of a spark and gets this one back on track. The Dracula-influenced Jonathan Harker's Journal  takes things into more sinister territory with an impressive solo from Easton before Sometimes Shit Happens For A Reason  goes back into power-pop territory to good effect...

  I guess it must be the time of year but we seem to be getting a lot of cover albums around here at the moment. New York's Fuzztones have been mainstays on the garage rock scene for close to four decades and this album sees them paying tribute to several of their fellow Big Apple bands. Kicking in with a fun rewrite of Sinatra's New York New York , the fact that their city has such a good record in churning out influential punk, glam and garage rock has certainly given Rudi Protrudi and co plenty of fertile ground to choose from with the Ramones ( 53rd & 3rd ), Johnny Thunders ( Microdot  is a fun rewrite of Chinese Rocks ), the New York Dolls ( Babylon ), the Cramps ( New Kind Of Kick ), the Dead Boys ( High Tension Wire  and Not Anymore ), Patti Smith ( Dancing Barefoot ), Blue Oyster Cult ( Transmaniacom MC ), Mink DeVille ( Let Me Dream ), Wayne County ( Flip Your Wig ) and Richard Hell & The Voidoids ( You Gotta Lose ) all present and correct. To give the Fu...

  The original plan this month was not to have a Singles Bar as, let's face it, there's usually very little out in terms of new releases in January (as the fact that pretty much all the albums we've reviewed this month came out in November/December last year probably testifies). However, upon investigating the inboxes we did manage to find just enough stuff to merit doing a smaller-than-usual column hence this one-off Singles Mini-Bar. Feel free to help yourself... The biggest name on our review list for this month is Tyla's Dogs D'Amour   with their new "Powder Dry EP"  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑). I think most people know that Tyla is one heck of a prolific songwriter and it's led to times in recent years where it's felt a bit as if quantity has sometimes taken precedence over quality for Mr Pallas. However, this mournful ode to old friends who've left this world far too soon is a good effort from the guy and you may find yourself with something in yer eye ...

  "I'm not the same as you. That's always been the problem, it's a problem that we hide away but true..."  - Strangelove   - Beautiful Alone  1996 Every generation of teenagers always has a sort of cache of groups who they turn to in their darker moments. Those lucky enough to come 10-15 years before me had goth in its heyday and were lucky enough to witness Bauhaus, the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission, the Cure etc first time around. By the time I reached the age where teenage mood swings kicked in of course, I wasn't so lucky. Some time around the start of the '90s, goth kind of split in two with one arm heading off into heavier industrial waters (Ministry et al) and the other sort of melding with the more ethereal end of indie and mutating into shoegazing (Lush etc). By the time the mid-'90s came around, the whole idea of goth as it was in its prime was pretty much dead in the water and it wouldn't be until my late twenties when I re-discovered th...

  Hailing from LA (where else?), the Compulsions are the brainchild of sleaze-rock veteran Robert Carlyle but if you're expecting a straight-up group of Guns 'n' Roses soundalikes here then you might just have another think coming. With an impressive pedigree backing band (including former Bowie guitarist Earl Slick on a few numbers), Ferocious  is certainly an interesting proposition. Opener Born On A Landfill  is a Cinderella style slice of grubby blues-rock but just when you've got the Compulsions pegged, they promptly smack you upside the head with the sinister electro-sleaze of Band Of Thieves  (which reminds me of short-lived early noughties types the Beautiful Creatures) before Addicted  takes things back into more familiar territory with some seasick slide guitar from former Gunners man Bumblefoot. Covers of the Stones' Dead Flowers  and G'n'R's Dust And Bones  are handled well, the former given a liberal dose of rocket fuel and the latter give...

  Staples of the '80s Soho sleaze scene along with the likes of the Dogs D'Amour, Marionette et al, the Dirty Strangers are something of a great lost band of the genre with their self-titled debut album from 1988 being an oft-overlooked classic. Although they split in the mid-'90s the group, led by Stones associate Alan Clayton, would reform in 2007 and have been a steady presence on the scene since with two albums released since then. Monkey Seed , however, dates from just before the band got back together and three of them including Clayton were playing gigs around London under this name. In keeping with the power trio format they were using at the time, it's 17 slices of lean mean garage rock with the likes of Don't Come Easy , Knuckleduster  and Good Good Loving  coming on like a West London MC5. A few of these numbers would subsequently resurface on the Strangers' subsequent comeback album, 2011's West 12 to Wittering  including Liberty Smile , Gold Cor...