Album Review: The Gold Needles - "What's Tomorrow Ever Done For You?"

 

Hailing from Hull, this is the second album from power-pop merchants the Gold Needles and it gets off to a bit of an odd start with the opening title track being more reminiscent of a poppier version of Franz Ferdinand than anything which makes me wonder if this review promo's been sent to the right place! Happily though, the Roxy Music indebted I Get The Pressure quickly rights things with some good fierce guitar work and a Bowie-esque chorus to get this album back on track.

Precious Times takes a trip into early '80s psychedelia territory (think Doctor & The Medics or XTC in one of their poppier modes) while the bluesy strut of Stones soundalike Dead Man's Hand and covers of George Harrison's If I Needed Someone and the Hollies' Have You Ever Loved Somebody? show proof of their '60s influences. Story Of My Life meanwhile, has an early Elvis Costello style spikiness to it while the sinister epic Realm of the Black Dog which has some haunting electronica powering along its intro and some nice twin guitar work on it might just be the album highlight before the gentle acoustics of Drown My Sorrow sign this one off nicely.

It's not all plain sailing - Billy Liar just sounds a bit messy and Susie Is Sorted is a bit unremarkable. But there's far more good than bad here and, even if they're not exactly the world's most original band, the Gold Needles at least give the impression of being a band who enjoy what they do and carry that enthusiasm and energy over into What's Tomorrow Ever Done For You? and, with the production here carrying a decent punch to help these songs along, this ain't bad at all.

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