Album Review: Baby Shakes - "Shake The System"

 

Ah the joys of the January review pile As has often been observed in the past, this is very much the graveyard shift of the year where yer average reviewer has to look at stuff they may have missed in the last few months. So at least you know what to expect on here until the release schedule starts to pick up again in February/March.

Anyway, you may remember New York's Baby Shakes for their rather excellent Cause A Scene album in 2019 which was one of the first reviews we ever did on Nite Songs. Shake The System is more of a stop-gap album of demos and previously unreleased tracks with all proceeds going to the NAACP charity which supports racial justice and equal rights. So all for a very worthy cause then.

The material herein is the usual impressively tight and tuneful power-pop that we've come to know and love this band for with a few tracks such as Running Through The Night and Modern Girl Renegade which have surfaced on previous releases rubbing shoulders with rough 'n' ready demo versions of Love's A Crime and If Looks Could Kill. Certainly the new tracks are no cast-offs either with the zippy All The Pretty Things, the Dollsy Boys Talk and the Speedways-esque melodies of On A Friday being particular highlights.

Although it's more of a curio collection, there's still plenty here to keep fans of the group and sugar sweet power pop in general satisfied. And let's face it, it's all for a good cause so you know what to do.

Bandcamp link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 #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

Album Review: Ming City Rockers - "Lime"

Image
  Hailing from Immingham near Grimsby (hence their name), the Ming City Rockers briefly looked like quite hot property a few years ago with their debut self-titled album being a prime slice of howled smalltown angst which picked them up enough plaudits to get Steve Albini in to produce the follow-up, 2016's  Lemon . And then...nothing. Seven years on from that sophomore effort and the group have returned, slimmed down to a three-piece and with a very noticeable change to their image. But the sound is very much the same with the sort of angry three-chord garage punk that made their debut such a good effort. The change seems to be that Lime  sees the Ming City Rockers taking their worldview out of the smalltowns and over to the nation as a whole. The sarky lead off single Jill Was An Anarchist  was a definite marker laid down and there's plenty more on Lime  where that came from such as the snarling Poor Old Jim  taking a swipe at alcoholic F*r*ge-supporting boomers ( "He us
Read more