Album Review: Muck And The Mires - “Greetings From Muckingham Palace”

 

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 on this site in recent weeks and unfortunately it's just come up a bit short.

There's plenty of energy and tightness in here from Muck & The Mires as evidenced on the likes of This Time I Know I'm Right, Sunny Feeling and the duck-walking Don't Start Running Away. The trouble is that they don't really add anything new to what's already a pretty well-worn formula and it just leaves this album feeling like it lacks a bit of a spark compared to some of its competitors as evidenced on the schmaltzy Too Soon To Fall In Love and the generic Mint Condition and Messed Up Mary.

Like I say, I think Muck & The Mires have maybe just been a bit unlucky with their timing here - there's nothing to say that if Greetings From Muckingham Palace hadn't landed in a month where I've already listened to a lot of bands of this genre then I might have been a bit better disposed to it. As it is though, while it's a perfectly reasonable collection of fast 'n' tight garage rock, there are better efforts out there to spend your money on unfortunately. Sorry guys.

Bandcamp link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌓🌓🌓🌓🌓🌓🌑🌑🌑🌑 (6/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nite Songs Top 50 Albums of 2023 - Part 5 (The Top 10)

Image
  And so the end is near...we present to you the ten best albums of the year just gone in our humble opinion... 10.     BEANS ON TOAST - "The Toothpaste And The Tube" Another regular presence in my end of year lists in recent years, The Toothpaste And The Tube  sees Jay McAllister aka Beans on Toast returning to the fray in fine form and taking on everything from the joys of life on tour ( Back Out On The Road , The Golden Lion ) through laments at the state of the country ( Hope & Glory , The Greenwash ) to enjoying the simpler things in life to get you through ( Swimming In The Sea , The Dragicorn ). McAllister is quite simply one of the best lyric writers in the country today and The Toothpaste And The Tube  is a fine place to start for those wanting to discover his work. *** 9.     CYANIDE PILLS - "Soundtrack To The New Cold War" Soundtrack To The New Cold War sees Leeds pop-punks the Cyanide Pills well and truly coming of age. The group have long been mast
Read more

Sounds From The Junkshop #70: The Dead Pets

Image
  "Well you might shake your head at the things I once said but it comes from my heart not what I've read"  - The Dead Pets  - Dreams For A Crook Living legends in this writer's native city of Leeds, to my mind it's an absolutely criminal shame that the world at large seemed to miss out on the sheer joy of the Dead Pets. As I've sort of mentioned on here, by the time my university years finished in 2001 and I found myself back in West Yorkshire after four years away, I'd realised that my music tastes weren't necessarily being catered for by the legions of identikit "million dollar looks and ten cent tunes" New York garage punk bands or the cringy frat-punks who were saturating the pages of the NME and Kerrang! respectively and had started to strike out on my own looking for other things to satisfy my craving for good life-affirming rock ‘n’ roll. Trying to find my place in the whole musical scheme of things was a very lengthy process of trial
Read more

Album Review: Girls In Synthesis - "The Rest Is Distraction"

Image
  It's safe to say that The Rest Is Distraction  has a bit of a hint of the last chance saloon about it. When Girls In Synthesis first raised their heads above water with 2020's Now Here's An Echo From Your Future , they seemed like one of the most vital new bands in Britain at the time. Mixing brutal post-punk jarring rhythms with a furiously nihilistic lyrical outlook, the world looked to be their oyster. Two years on though, a lot has changed. Several of the group's politico-noise contemporaries have either stumbled and put out underwhelming follow-ups to their defining albums (Idles, Fontaines DC) or just never fulfilled the early potential they seemed to have (TV Priest). And with Girls In Synthesis themselves having put out a couple of EP's which were slightly disappointing, foregoing the pin missile anger of Now Here's An Echo...  for lumbering experimentalism that tended to blunder off down blind alleys when it should've been going for the throat, th
Read more