Album Review: The Mudd Club - "Bottle Blonde"

 

Take two American ex-pats from Kansas relocated to Machynlleth and a Welsh bass player and you evidently get the Mudd Club, a suitably scuzzy garage glam band with the ten tracks on Bottle Blonde speeding past in an agreeably quick 28 minutes.

I get the impression that people are going to compare this group to Amyl & The Sniffers with the snarling vocals and stripped down backing definitely being similarity. However, while I have to admit that the Sniffers' album was a bit of a disappointment mainly because of how quickly it started repeating itself, this is much better with songs such as Killin' Me (which sounds like an old Dr Feelgood number liberally drenched in glitter and fumes), the creepy Cramps-indebted Wombat Twist and the surf-punk demolition derby of She Creature adding the necessary variety to the more straight-ahead Chats style slices of fast 'n' loud garage punk like Bored To Death, Sick and Paper Cut. There's a wickedly playful sense of humour here which you can't help but enjoy as well such as they way they gleefully rip off the White Stripes' Fell In Love With A Girl on Love's Not Dead or the way Surf Kansas bemoans the lack of surfing opportunities in the American mid-west.

The Mudd Club are most definitely not big or clever but there's something undeniably enjoyable about the sheer carefree abandon with which they attack these songs in the finest X-Ray Spex/Adverts/Rezillos DIY punk style. As we say up here in Yorkshire, it's alright for them what likes fun. Recommended.


NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

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