Album Review: Kris Rodgers & The Dirty Gems - "Still Dirty"

 

We first heard from Wicked Cool signed power poppers Kris Rodgers & The Dirty Gems via their supremely funky She Likes To Party single towards the end of last year and now we have the group's debut album ready to go here. Said single kickstarts the album and it still sounds good now with its infectious chorus and squeezebox led guitar (although it's a bit difficult to get Murray Head's old novelty hit One Night In Bangkok out of your head while listening to it if you're of a certain age!)

Said song also kind of plots out the way this album goes thereafter - it's all big bold brass soaked soul-influenced rock 'n' roll complete with Rodgers' swirling keyboards over the top as evidenced on the Stax style strut of I Can't Give It and I'm Your Man and the well handled cover of Elton John's Take Me To The Pilot. It's all good stuff played with plenty of enthusiasm and clearly designed with pinpoint precision to get a crowd dancing after a few pints but my only complaint is that it starts to get a tiny bit samey as the album goes on.

There's the odd slight deviation away from the formula such as the Thin Lizzy style rolling riff of Don't Look Back and the gentle balladry of Across The Galaxy and See You Again while Tortuga goes into almost mambo territory but by and large this is the sound of a band finding a formula they're happy with and sticking to it. Not bad then but it's just missing a proper knockout blow to really reel your attention in. Still, I'm sure that on this evidence that'll come in time and I get the impression that this lot can properly kickstart a party in the live arena.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A brief return from the dead...

Image
  Yup, we're back. Don't all get excited at once. I’d been toying with the idea of doing an end of year list again this year and after a lot of umming and aahing eventually decided to go for it. As with last year, inevitably there were bumps along the way. As of the start of December, I thought this list would be around 40 albums but inevitably reading other people’s lists pointed me towards a bunch of stuff that had passed me by earlier in the year. Plus of course there’s always a few teasing buggers who put stuff out at the last possible moment. So 40 became 50 which became 60 which finally became 70. You lucky people. Actually though, reading through this list, the main thing that strikes me is that I think this might be the most musically varied end of year list that Nite Songs has ever done. From gentle acoustics through acclaimed indie veterans to punk thrash and good old fashioned scuzzy rock ‘n’ roll via some decidedly unexpected diversions (industrial folk music? Check...
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

Garbage Days Revisited #19 - The Dictators - "Go Girl Crazy!" (1975)

Image
  "Set me free, I might know better when I'm older but till then..."  - The Dictators  - Weekend By some distance the oldest album we've featured in this column so far, I very nearly went for the Dictators' 2001 comeback album DFFD  for this feature similar to what I did with the New York Dolls GDR article a couple of weeks back but after a bit of umming and ahhing, I decided it really had to be the group's 1975 debut Go Girl Crazy!  just because it's arguably the great trailblazing US punk album that everyone's forgotten about. I guess that you could almost say that if the Ramones were the Sex Pistols of US punk then the Dictators were kind of like the Eddie & The Hot Rods in that they crashlanded just that one year too early to really reap the punk whirlwind when it took off in 1976-77 but if you listen to Go Girl Crazy! , it's got the fingerprints of a lot of bands who'd come along soon afterwards on it, especially da Bruddas. The big ...
Read more