Album Review: Indonesian Junk - "Living In A Nightmare"

 

Signed to the excellent Rum Bar records, Indonesian Junk have been slowly making a name for thesmselves in the last couple of years. Hailing from Milwaukee, the group are clearly in thrall to the poppier side of '70s NYC punk and, let's face it, that's always likely to go down well with us.

I have to be honest, Livin' In A Nightmare gets off to a bit of a slow start - Kind of Girl and One More Try (the latter featuring Kurt Baker) are slightly sluggish mid-paced efforts which clearly owe a tip of the hat to the more melodic side of the Ramones' output complete with vocals which sound like a cross between Joey and Stiv Bators but you kind of wish there was a bit more muscle in there to push things along.

Happy to say though, Livin' In The USA rights things in style with a much needed dose of snotty aggression to kick things up a gear. The almost '60s style power-pop of I Don't Mind provides a bit of an unexpected twist as well which is always welcome.

This kind of sets the pattern for the rest of the album - Indonesian Junk sound at their best when they hit full throttle such as on the enjoyably sloppy Policeman, the chugging You Won't See Me and the low slung Stonesy swagger of Tracy which account for about half of the album. And while the slower songs comprising the other half such as Knew It All Along and Slow Dancin' are still perfectly respectable, the vocals just kind of don't really suit them as well. The closing power ballad Bawlin' My Eyes Out deserves a mention as well as it could easily have been a disaster but they somehow manage to pack the chops to carry it off especially on the flashy outro solo which is quite impressive when you think about it.

Living In A Nightmare is a decent first effort but it sounds like a band who are still kind of working out what their best sound. Hopefully next time they'll build on the promise here and give us a bit of a leaner meaner effort which plays to their strengths a bit more comprehensively. So not quite perfect but, y'know, that's okay, everybody's allowed a first album to test the water.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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 #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