Album Review: Sam Fender - "Seventeen Going Under"

 

Sam Fender is one of those names I've heard in passing a few times but this is my first actual encounter with his music. Hailing from North Shields, this is the 26-year-old's second album and has already followed its predecessor to the top of the charts. So no pressure here then.

The main artist Fender reminds me of on Seventeen Going Under is a Geordie version of the Gaslight Anthem - he has the same sort of warts 'n' all tales of growing up in a less than salubrious area that Brian Fallon used to do so well a decade or so ago as evidenced on the opening title track ("Fist fights on the beach, the bizzies round us up, do it all again next week"). It's not the be all and end all of his repertoire though - Aye is an angry state of the world address ("They watched Jackie pick up Kennedy's head/They watched kids go to Epstein's bed") which builds slowly to a sheer explosion of foul-mouthed anger on the outro.

There's a bit of a modern day Manics influence on here as well - certainly there's similarities between Fender's voice and that of James Dean Bradfield but the soaring guitars of Get You Down and the gentle almost trip-hop style rhythms of Last To Make It Home definitely recall Blackwood's finest. At the other end of the scale, the tender ode to staying true to yourself Mantra and the stripped back closer The Dying Light show his lyrics at their most stark and honest.

It would have been easy to be cynical about this album but I'm happy to say that this is one of the times where hype and sales are justified - Sam Fender is a guy with an ear for a thought-provoking lyric and a big skyscraping chorus and that's not an easy trick to pull off. Bruised but defiant, Seventeen Going Under is an album that bears up well to repeated listening with the often dark and personal lyrics and is well worth your investigation.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

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