Nite Songs

  The Other Ones first came to our attention back in February when they cropped up in our Singles Bar with their Forever Young  release. Our verdict was that it was alright if you liked the whole US college pop-punk scene of the late '90s but it felt a bit too safe and polished for its own good. Now two months later, we've had their debut album drop here - can it surpass our decidedly modest expectations? It gets off to a good start with the fast 'n' furious breakup ode Drown You and the spiky grunge-pop of On Top Of Me and Money . On the flip side though, the dull Out Of My Head  and the saccharine  I Wish I Was Your Boyfriend  pass by without really leaving much of an impression and while Forever Young  and Better Off Alone  at least have an energy behind them, they just kind of lack the spikiness needed to make them really stand out. The paranoid Wasted Youth  does at least get things back on track nicely before the stroppy Sad Case,  the ...

  There's no two ways about it - as well as being one of the genuine good guys in rock 'n' roll, Mike Peters is also one of its most persistent people. War  is the third album from the Alarm in as many years following on from 2018's competent Equals  and 2019's excellent Sigma . Driven on by the sheer boredom of lockdown (Peters and his wife are both cancer survivors and have been stuck shielding for almost the whole duration of the last 12 months), Peters has turned his inactivity into energy and written and recorded War  in a matter of weeks. Not that you'd guess it given the quality which makes it even more impressive. Axl Rose take note. The clarion call of "Whether you like it or not, the world has changed forever"  kicks opener Protect And Survive  into gear in fine style as Peters rails against Covid and the social injustices it's laid bare right in front of us in true preacher on the mountain style. The sinister electronica of We Got This  ...

  "I've got this feeling that it won't last the night..."  - Shed Seven , Lies I mentioned a while back in the Heavy Stereo SFTJ column about how local loyalties can be a powerful factor in dictating which bands you like especially when you come from a place like Yorkshire which often tends to regard itself as a bit of a separate entity from Britain or England as a whole. Prime example - York natives Shed Seven, even at their commercial peak when they were Top 10 regulars, were always regarded as a bit of a joke band in the alternative music press. Initially lumped in with the New Wave of New Wave then (perhaps fortuitously) reassigned to Britpop as they were poppy enough to fit in with the scene, they seemed to attract the "poor man's Oasis" jibes right from the get-go (not helped by the music press gleefully stoking up a Yorkshire vs Lancashire rivalry between the two). Well, it's time for a bit of counterbalance here because their second album, A...

  "One day I'll fly away, head for the sun, one day I'm hoping maybe that I'll feel like someone..."  - Hurricane #1 -  Keep Walking , 1997 This, I suspect, is going to be quite a convoluted SFTJ so you might want to nip out and get yourself a cup of tea and a couple of biscuits. Don't worry, I'll still be here ready to go when you get back. All ready now? Good. Okay, so before Hurricane #1 there was Ride who were one of the few shoegazing bands of the early '90s that I actually used to quite like. I almost certainly first discovered them while having one of those evenings suitably, erm, relaxed shall we say on "magic parsley" round at one of my shoegazer mates' houses in my mid-teens that I mentioned in the Lush SFTJ last month. Any road up, Ride were a four-piece from Oxford who were signed to Creation (back when it was known as the premier shoegazing label in the days before Oasis). Unlike a lot of bands of the genre though, they were...

  The arrival of a new Alice Cooper album in 2021 is something where you generally think "well, this could go either way really..." The harsh truth is that since 2012's excellent Welcome 2 My Nightmare , Alice's output has been a bit patchy to be honest with 2018's Paranormal  having a definite whiff of being phoned in and the two Hollywood Vampires albums being decidedly less than essential. Detroit Stories is, as the name suggests, a tribute to the town where the original Alice Cooper band made their name and when it gets off to a start with a cover of Lou Reed's Rock 'n' Roll , although it's done well enough, it's not exactly a sign that this is a band with its kick back. Then, of course, second track Go Man Go  smacks you right in the teeth with a frenzied incendiary slice of garage punk. It's easily the best song Alice has put his name to in the last eight years or so and you breathe a sigh of relief. Lead off single Social Debris  is ...

  I first encountered goth/alt-country crossover types Lucero with their Among The Ghosts  album a few years ago when a friend recommended it to me (although the band have actually been active for over two decades now). A fine slice of dark southern states music, it was one of the better albums of the year and upon finding out that the band had a follow up due out, it was one that I was keenly anticipating. When You Found Me  is essentially a straight continuation of Among The Ghosts  and that's not a bad place to be right from the ominous riff of opener Have You Lost Your Way?  and the chugging Outrun The Moon  which is five minutes long but definitely feels shorter - always a good sign. Similar to its predecessor, the impressive thing about this album is the sheer variety on show here from the skeletal acoustics of Coffin Nails  and the title track through Good As Gone  which sounds like Tom Petty with the amps turned right up to the honky tonk ...

  "Oh I've wasted all my time on all these stupid things that only get me down/And the sky is crying out tonight for me to leave this town"  - Pulp  - "Countdown" In the summer of 1995, the question on everyone's lips was "So who do you prefer then, Blur or Oasis?" And, of course, the sensible response was "Dunno mate. I f**kin' love  Pulp though." I think my first encounter with Jarvis Cocker et al was hearing Babies  on Top of the Pops in the summer of '94 - I remember enjoying seeing him wearing an "I Hate Wet Wet Wet" T-shirt which automatically scored him brownie points with me as this was in the middle of the nuclear winter of their seemingly endless run at number one with that Troggs cover from that terrible Richard Curtis rom-com. I bought it and its predecessor Do You Remember The First Time? soon afterwards but for some reason it took me until the following year to buy the excellent His 'n' Hers  album....

  "In the great scheme of things, it doesn't matter. I'll get through it a little bruised and battered. And maybe some day I can just laugh at myself..."  - The Supernaturals , Pie In The Sky , 1997 Written off at the time as the point where the Britpop movement essentially ate itself whole and paved the way for alternative music to get a lot more serious and dark and a lot less fun under Thom Yorke, the Supernaturals are, to my mind, a band who deserve re-appraisal. Or at least their debut album does anyway. After that, they kind of lost their way a bit...but we'll come to that later. I first heard of the band when their first Top 40 hit Lazy Lover  (ironically one of the weaker songs on their debut album) cropped up on a Shine compilation back in the day (ah the joys of 1996). It didn't really grab me but the follow-up The Day Before Yesterday's Man  did and this was the one which did reel me in. The Day Before Yesterday's Man  is pretty much the Sup...

  I'll put my hands up and say that NOFX are one of those bands who seem to have drifted in and out of my musical listening over the past two decades. I first listened to them back in the early noughties when I was given the excellent War On Errorism  album (the record Green Day's over-rated American Idiot  should have been) to review for a 'zine I was working for at the time but I lost track of them a bit afterwards only to for them to kind of claw their way back into my consciousness over the last couple of years via an excellent split album with Frank Turner ( West Coast vs Wessex ) and Fat Mike's Cokie The Clown side project ( You're Welcome must be one of the most bleak and harrowing albums I've ever listened to but it's pretty damn amazing it has to be said). We're thrown into Single Album one at the deep end with opening track The Big Drag  being nearly six minutes long and dealing with drug related deaths and an existential crisis (very similar ...

Signed to Xtra Mile recordings, home of Beans On Toast and (occasionally) Frank Turner, my first expectations of Crazy Arm was as another one of those slightly folky troubadours but they're definitely a bit of a heavier proposition. Hailing from Devon, this is their fourth album with its predecessors dating back as far as 2009. Opening song Montenegro  actually reminds me a bit of '90s punks Compulsion which is no bad thing while Blessed and Cursed builds from a gentle Men They Couldn't Hang style intro to a frenetic assault before the Pogues indebted folk-punk of Brave Starts Here  and the sinister Fear Up  keep the momentum ticking along. The Pogues and The Men They Couldn't Hang are definitely the two big touchstones for Crazy Arm but, similar to fellow folk-punks Ferocious Dog (and the Levellers before them), they at least sound like a band comfortable in their own skin. It's perhaps telling that they sound their best when they let their punkier instincts take o...

  "You were an extinction, a desert heat, a blind illness of my anxiety"  - Manic Street Preachers , Sleepflower I'm well aware that one must take care when writing about the Manics as their fans can be...how to put this politely...a bit touchy on the subject. So I should probably preface the next statement by saying that I would subsequently come to like the band but there was a long period during 1991-92 or so where I just thought they were just a bunch of gobby Welsh twats. The reason why was that, as anyone who remembers the group's early days will attest, the four of them (well, especially Nicky Wire and Richey James) very much had an "us against the world" attitude and weren't slow to let people know it. So when they slagged off groups like Carter USM, the Wonder Stuff and the Senseless Things* as the unambitious face of indie, it rubbed a lot of fans such as myself up the wrong way - supposedly it was a conversation on this very matter between Ric...

  So here's part two of this month's Singles Bar featuring a few more singles and a trio of EP's as well, Plenty to get our teeth into so let's crack on pronto, eh? We last heard from Adam & The Hellcats  last year with the enjoyable  Welcome To The Madhouse  single. They have put out another one since in House of Straw  but honestly I wasn't that big a fan of it (sorry guys) hence why we didn't feature it on here. However, new effort  Bending The Knee  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑) is a big improvement sounding like some unholy collision between fellow Bristolians Vice Squad and the Sisters of Mercy at their most bombastic. A big stomping six-minute epic, this is a good taster for the upcoming Hellcats album due in April, Looking forward to it.  Bandcamp link here Split single time and this one is a bit of a mouthwaterer as Nottingham scumbags The Hip Priests  team up with the legendary Supersuckers . While the 'Suckers track Deceptive Expectations has a...

Welcome back to the Singles Bar for our March instalment. As seems to be becoming a regular occurrence at the moment, this is another two-parter with this bit being all singles and the second part a mix of singles and EP's. Let's get that first order in and see what's on the radar this month then shall we?... The Dowling Poole   have been a regular fixture in this column over the last 6 months or so and their latest release Slow Genocide  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑) is a paranoid Sleaford Mods-style ode to the lockdown and the government's clueless handling of it featuring gruff vocals from Terrorvision's Tony Wright. Sinister and creepy, it's a good slice of political paranoia 2021 style. With the group's long time lyrical target Donald Trump now gone from the White House, it looks like the band are now squarely training their sights on the cabinet of leeches running the UK and there's plenty of anger here to stoke the fires of discontent. Bandcamp link here Saint Agn...

  "The lyrics aren’t supposed to mean that much, they’re just a vehicle for a lovely voice..."  - Mansun , An Open Letter Yo The Lyrical Trainspotter , 1996 By early 1997, it's fair to say that most people kind of knew Britpop was living on borrowed time. With Oasis blundering through a cocaine blizzard towards the musical dog turd that was Be Here Now  and Blur and Pulp both in the process of essentially abandoning the genre all together in favour of heading into more musically challenging waters, it left the scene running on fumes to all intents and purposes with none of the newer bands who'd sprung up towards the poppier end of indie really having anything much to offer beyond half-arsed rehashes of what Noel, Damon and Jarvis had done much better two years ago. It had had its moment in the sun but now it was just waiting for someone to administer the death blow to it which would duly come in the form of Blur's "couldn't be less poppy if it tried"...