Album Review: Stiff Richards - "State Of Mind"

 

Well, with a band name like that we'd have been fools not to listen to this one. Hailing from Melbourne, Stiff Richards are another of those ultra-raw garage punk bands that seem to have emerged from the Antipodes in recent years to go alongside Amyl & The Sniffers and the Chats. Certainly hearing the rabid Point Of You exploding from the speakers sounding like some almighty three way collision between the Dead Boys, the Parkinsons and the Saints at their rawest, the bar is set pretty high for this one.

The only slight problem with State of Mind is that it doesn't really have a lot of variety to it as the title track, Talk and Going Numb don't really deviate from the template set out on the opener although they've got enough anger and snotty energy to just about carry 'em through. But it's only with the sinister rumbling Mr Situation that it feels like Stiff Richards are really trying to shift things around a bit. Worth it when it happens though. Got It To Go is another mid-tempo number although the screamed vocals over the top certainly ensure that you're in no danger of losing interest before the lightning speed one-two-three of Glass, the social distancing tirade Kids Out On The Grass and Fill In The Blanks (which has some good East Bay Ray style guitar on it) sign this one off in a suitably Stiv-esque tornado of vitriol.

Stiff Richards aren't quite the finished article yet but State Of Mind shows that, barring the issue of a few of the tracks maybe straying a bit too close to each other in their sound, they're definitely getting there. Give them another album to work out what's working and what isn't and there's the germ of a very exciting punk band coming through here. A work in progress then but definitely a suitably feral one.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

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

Album Review: The Fades - "Night Terrors"

Image
  Hailing from South London, the Fades are gaining a reputation of one of the premier garage rock bands in the capital these days and, as with a few albums we've reviewed in these webpages of late, Night Terrors  was written during the lockdown as it was a recurring feature of life for the band's frontman Dave during the lockdown. As befits its title and subject matter, Night Terrors  is an off-kilter effort which might take a few listens to get into but rewards those who persevere with it. Certainly, the discordant vocals and guitars often give the impression of the whole operation being on the verge of collapse on the likes of The Pessimist  and Known It All Along  while Lost My Job  goes into XTC/Nightingales style post-punk territory. However, the likes of People In General  show that they can rein the weirdness in and build up an intriguing multi-part epic which starts off as tuneful new wave before drifting into a nightmarish state-of-the-nation ...
Read more