Nite Songs

  "It's been a while since we were last wasted..."  - Linoleum -   On A Tuesday , 1997 There seems to be a common thread through the SFTJ's covering the Britpop era and afterwards of great bands who for some reason or other just never quite slotted in anywhere. Linoleum are another good example - they seemed to be a band who were forever lumped with the sub-Elastica student indie likes of Sleeper and Echobelly but they were way better than that. Unfortunately the fact that they didn't really fit into the stereotype of what a female-fronted Britpop band was supposed to be was I think maybe the reason why Top 40 success largely eluded them. The world's loss really I first heard the band after Steve Lamacq started playing their early '97 single On A Tuesday  (arguably their best moment) on the Evening Session. Although maybe there's a superficial similarity to the above Britpop bands, Linoleum always seemed a lot darker and gothier - if anything they were...

  Suzi Quatro's previous album, 2019's No Control  was honestly the first of her 21st century output that I'd heard when I reviewed it for Pure Rawk . Maybe it's because I was expecting Devil Gate Drive part 2 but I was a little bit disappointed with the more "mature" direction, veering off into almost cocktail jazz territory in places. With this new album being touted as a return to her roots, my general thought upon reading the blurb was "oh aye? We'll see about that..." So when the opening title track of The Devil In Me  kicks in with a downright filthy guitar riff before ripping into a chugging glam rock riff, it feels like the queen's returned to sit on her throne. And I'm happy to say that it sets the tone nicely for the album with the stomping riff of Hey Queenie  and the bluesy stomp of Betty Who?  keeping the tempo up. It's as if Suzi has taken the slightly mid-paced blues of her previous effort and casually dosed it in nitro...

  Safe to say that this one is much-anticipated. Having graced us with two excellent albums at the start of the last decade and been briefly touted as the next big thing by the music press, Black Spiders' sudden split in 2015 just as it seemed they were hitting their stride was a bit of a gutter to put it mildly. Happy to say though that 2021 sees Doncaster's finest rock export returning to the fray with a self-titled third album which is well worth the wait. While the opening duo of excellent lead-off single Fly In The Soup  and Stabbed In The Back have the necessary urgency about them to grab your attention straight away, the lurching Sabbath style riff of Wizard Shall Not Kill Wizard  takes the heaviosity up a level to good effect while Back In The Convent  sounds like Wolfsbane trading riffs with Van Halen and when the Priest style menace of Give 'Em What They Want  and a well-executed cover of the Easybeats' Good Times  (similar to the excellent INXS/J...

  "And these are the thoughts that you keep inside, you smile from your window and stand all alone. And pour all the love that you keep inside into a song..."  - Suede , He’s Gone It was probably inevitable that we'd come to cover Suede on this blog at some point. In a way, the story here has a lot of parallels with the Manic Street Preachers GDR entry from a month or two ago but let's pick it up some time around 1993 or so. I think the first time I heard Suede properly was when Animal Nitrate  blasted into the Top 10 and I really can't state enough as a 14-year-old just how much of a shock to the system that song was for me. With Brett Anderson's screeched vocals and Bernard Butler's truly ferocious guitar riff cutting like a razor, it sounded thrilling and terrifying at the same time. I remember seeing them play the Brit awards a few weeks later - it's easy to forget now but early Suede were genuinely disturbing. While Butler, bassist Mat Osman and ...

  "Lands are green and skies are blue but all in all, we're just like you"  - Spacehog , In The Meantime , 1996 I've mentioned in SFTJ's past how it was a bit of a rarity in the mid-'90s for bands from Leeds or Bradford to be chart-bothering material. I started listening to guitar music in the early '90s and as far as northern music went then the focus was very much across the Pennines in Manchester. Although the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission and the Cult were all technically Leeds/Bradford bands (or at least had members hailing from there), it was unlikely to say the least that you were going to run into Andrew Eldritch or Wayne Hussey on the Headrow or see Ian Astbury doing his shopping at the Kirkgate Centre. New Model Army were still doggedly hanging on at this point although they were very much at the tail end of their success by now while the Bridewell Taxis and Cud never really rose above cult status (though as mentioned in the first Footnotes secti...

  Safe to say that this is an album that’s been hotly anticipated in these parts. Chris Catalyst (both solo and when he's fronting the Eureka Machines) is one of those guys where you can't help but wonder why someone who's such a talented songwriter with an ear for a great tune and perpetually able to keep the listener interested isn't someone able to sell out academy sized venues across the UK and regularly score Top 10 albums. It's been a couple of years since we last heard from Chris via the Eurekas' Victories  album - admittedly the Covid crisis did kind of get in the way of things but this album definitely reminds you how much we've missed the guy while he's been away. From the squalling riff of opener Make Good Art  (which features none other than Neil Gaiman reading out a manifesto while Chris provides the instrumentation), it's clear the guy means business here. King of Everything ,  Divide And Rule  and A Modern Adventure  see not only Catal...

  One of the more unexpected but nevertheless welcome returns of the year so far, Los Angeles natives the Streetwalkin' Cheetahs were the great should have beens of the whole all-too-brief glam-punk explosion of the noughties. Drawing from the same Dolls/Ramones/Hanoi Rocks influences as a lot of the pack around them but utilising them with a lot more savvy than nearly all of their contemporaries, they produced a glorious run of albums in the early years of the decade ( Guitars, Guns And God and Waiting For The Death Of My Generation  being particularly good) before general apathy sunk them before they'd really managed to get going. Eighteen years later and frontman Frank Meyer has reunited the band for another go and I'm pleased to report that One More Drink  is a good comeback effort from the band. While the likes of Fast, Fucked And Furious  and The Rejected  have the requisite Supersuckers style assault you'd maybe come to expect, there's a lot more to this ...

  "Fuck with me and I'll fuck with you, isn't that what we're supposed to do? Cut me down and I will kill you too, isn't that what we're supposed to do?"  - The Jesus & Mary Chain , Dirty Water I've written several times in both SFTJ and GDR about my evenings as a teenager sitting around with various friends of a weekend listening to albums in various peoples' bedrooms and drinking alcohol and smoking, erm, "magic parsley", when the funds and availability through mates' older brothers allowed. As I've said, a lot of the lads who I used to partake in these sessions with were either shoegazing or grunge fans so although we all got on well, I still felt like a bit of a square peg in a round hole with the group from time to time. I'd happily tolerate listening to Ride or Lush or whoever was on the stereo this week but it still wouldn't stop me asking if we could cue up some Senseless Things or Wonder Stuff or Carter on a...

  "The end is just a breath away and if you ain't got a weapon then you'll never get a say"  - 3 Colours Red , Nuclear Holiday , 1997 Look, I might as well just say it now, I basically got into 3 Colours Red because of their connections to two of my favourite bands a couple of years before. On one guitar you had Ben Harding, formerly of the awesome Senseless Things and on the other you had Chris McCormack, brother of the Wildhearts ' Danny. I mean, there was no way I was ever gonna pass on that, was I? I'm not quite sure how the exact deals went down but I'm guessing Ben and Chris met each other through their various Wildhearts connections as Mark Keds was playing guitar with Ginger and co around this time. Chris had also had a brief stint playing in Honeycrack with former 'Hearts CJ and Willie and after that fell through (he left before they released anything to be replaced by Mark McRae) had been writing songs with singer/bassist Pete Vuckovic who...

  And here we go with part 2 of our KGLW review double bill. Arriving a mere three months after K.G.  (see our earlier review today) landed, L.W.  kicks in in proper style with an absolute maelstrom of guitars and drums abruptly giving way to If Not Now Then When? , a funky soulful number which sounds oddly like a garage rock version of something off the Charlatans' Wonderland  album. Certainly if K.G. 's main point of reference was '60s psychedelia then L.W.  is aiming for the same era but more for the funky excursions of Sly Stone or Funkadelic as O.N.E.  demonstrates as it goes from a dreamy acoustic opening to a strutting rhythm which you can't help but be drawn in by. However, Pleura kicks things up a gear with a BOC/Sabbath style riff underpinned by some sitars which really shouldn't work as well as it does. Supreme Ascendancy  keeps up the Eastern feel with the drums skittering all over the shop to create something genuinely unique and fascinati...

  King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are one of those bands who I've heard of many times (well, with a name like that they're kind of difficult to miss) without actually checking their music out. However, with two albums new (or new-ish) out and having heard the band recently namechecked by no less an authority than the great and good Danko Jones, I decided that maybe it was time to catch up. As stated earlier, K.G.  is the first of a brace of albums from these Aussie psych-rock merchants and emerged in the dying days of 2020 (we'll have a review of its successor, the newly-released L.G.  up on the site later today). Sounding like a more chilled out Queens of the Stone Age (pre-shark jump obviously), the trippy fuzzed up rhythms of songs like Automation , Some Of Us  and Minimum Brain Size  (which is hiding some barbed lyrics at the band's doubters behind the warm laconic guitar lines get this off to a good start while Straws In The Wind  adds some skeletal...

  When you see a band being hailed as "the new stars of UK classic rock", you can't help but be a bit sceptical. After all, this is not a musical movement exactly known for its originality. So, are the Dust Coda another case of hype over substance or have we genuinely discovered British rock's bright new hopes? Well, the main band this lot bring to mind is Reef and I guess what you thought about Gary Stringer and co's worthy but rather dull bluesed-up take on Britrock in the mid-'90s will probably dictate what you think about this. Certainly when this band choose to kick things into gear properly such as on the chugging Limbo Man  and the Sweet Child o'Mine  soundalike Dream Alight , they turn in an agreeably no-frills take on the whole classic rock formula. The big problem is that Mojo Skyline  suffers from a chronic lack of originality. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can generally forgive this when the formula's done well but there does come a poi...

  "It’s always funny until someone gets hurt. And then it’s just hilarious"  - Faith No More , Ricochet It seems that when you discuss Faith No More these days the conversation seems to begin and end with The Real Thing  and Angel Dust  with this album being regarded as the point where lineup instability started to cost the band momentum. Which to my mind is greatly unfair - I would argue that King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime  is very much the equal of those two much more celebrated efforts. But I'm getting ahead of myself here, let's start at the beginning, shall we? Faith No More can probably hold their heads up as one of the first rock bands I got into after I saw the video for Epic  on Top of the Pops as an 11-year-old. My mind was comprehensively blown - it sounded like hardly anything else I'd ever heard up until this point and I ended up quickly heading down to Woolworths a couple of days later to buy it on cassette single. As I've said before, it...

Welcome back to the Singles Bar as we look through this month's releases. A bit of a shorter than usual column this month with five singles and a mini-album to get through so let's get on with it, shall we?... Rich Ragany & The Digressions  are currently limbering up for their second album and on the evidence of  Heartbreakers Don't Try  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑), a tribute to Johnny Thunders with its lyrical references to You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory unless my ears deceive me, it should be well worth the wait. A supremely tuneful slice of Tom Petty style power-pop (two Heartbreakers for the price of one, you might say) with some driving piano courtesy of ex-Shush man and all round production wiz Andy Brook, this is good stuff. Bandcamp link here .  It's always good to see some Jesse Malin  in the review pile although the jerky blues of  The Way We Used To Roll  (🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑) isn't quite up to the standard of his previous few releases like Ameri'ka or...