Nite Songs

  Paul Draper's second solo album following his extended hiatus after the break-up of Mansun was something I was excited to see land in my reviews pile. As I've mentioned when I did an SFTJ on Mansun many moons ago, I loved the band's classic debut Attack of the Grey Lantern  but subsequent releases never really did it for me. Having missed Draper's comeback, 2017's Spooky Action , I was interested to see how his sound had evolved since those halcyon days. Similar to a lot of Mansun's work, Cult Leader Tactics  is an album with a theme running through it, in this case people using manipulation to get what they want. Whether it's fraudulent self-help gurus (the title track), dysfunctional relationships ( You've Got No Life Skills, Baby! ), sniping critics ( Talkin' Behind My Back ) or the serial liars governing this country ( Internationalle ), there's a fair amount of Draper's trademark venom here and it's a much better album for it. Mus...

  "The telephone is ringin’, it sounds like a distant call/Little sister singin’, singin’ like a fire alarm…"  - The Throbs  - Comedown Sister Similar to the case of  Life, Sex & Death  a couple of years later, the Throbs were a classic case of a label (Geffen in this case) investing a ridiculous sum of money into a band who they were convinced would be the next big thing (Geffen were talking about them being the east coast Guns 'n' Roses at the time) only to put out a decent album that sank like a stone. The subject of bands who get hyped to high heaven upon first making their entrance on to the scene only for the press to turn on them instantly has been a constant one throughout the last couple of years on both Sounds From The Junkshop and Garbage Days Revisited ( These Animal Men , Birdland , Gay Dad ) so it seems apt given that we've been covering a lot of underrated sleaze rock bands in GDR of late that we've found that particular movement's versi...

  I think it's safe to say that those of us who were here at the Brudenell tonight needed something like this. In a week where the pressure cooker situation between the US and Russia has finally boiled over in the Ukraine, the news seems to get worse every day in terms of what the UK can expect in terms of soaring bills and poverty this year and not to even mention the utter shitshow going on at the top level of politics in both of our main parties, these are dark and worrying times indeed. Even Jay McAllister aka Beans on Toast, normally a man whose generally easygoing nature and cheerful tunes shine out for all to see, seems to be feeling it a bit as he explains during a between-song diatribe about how first we had Brexit and all the conflict that caused, then we had Covid and the lockdown and all the damage to our mental health that caused and now we've got the threat of nuclear war hanging over us and you wonder when this is all going to end. However, as he mentions at the ...

  "You can call me the Mango Kid but your girlfriend calls me baby..."  - Danko Jones  - The Mango Kid "Bloody hell, I've never seen a man headbang to a drum roll before!" in the words of my mate at that gig. It was some time in 2002 if I remember rightly and myself and a couple of friends had gone along to Leeds Cockpit to see the Backyard Babies on their Making Enemies Is Good  tour. We turned up a bit early and were lucky enough to see a support band who well and truly blew us away and very much gave the headliners a run for their money (good though the Backyards were that night). They were so good in fact that I've stuck with them for the two decades ever since. I refer of course to the one and only Mr Danko Jones. I seem to remember at the time that the group had just put out their debut album proper Born A Lion  and the set that night was a ferociously tight and wiry barrage of garage rock that would have caused Julian Casablancas and Jack White to sh...

Now here's a name I've not seen for a bit. Twenty years before Evil Scarecrow first suited up in their Halloween costumes to play a gig, there was Lawnmower Deth - arguably the silliest and funniest comedy thrash band there ever was. Now in 2022 after a near three decade gap, we finally get the band's fourth album (the group originally split up in 1994 following the release of album number three Billy which featured them turning in covers of Kim Wilde's Kids In America  and Squeeze's Up The Junction that none who heard them are likely to forget in a hurry but reformed in the late noughties and have been going strong ever since). Basically, Blunt Cutters  is everything you'd want a Lawnmower Deth album to be - supremely silly song titles like Space Herpes , Bastard Squad  and Now He's A Priest , odes to going shopping in Hell ( Power Bagging ) and collecting bobbleheads ( Bobblehead funnily enough) thirty second blasts of aggression called things like Swarfeg...

  It's weird to think that there was a time about 12-13 years ago when people were genuinely talking about Foxy Shazam as being the next big thing. Tipped by some as the American version of the Darkness, it unfortunately proved to be a bit of an anvil around their necks - not only were they actually a very different proposition from Justin Hawkins and co but their breakthrough album The Church of Rock 'n' Roll  turned out to be a big disappointment, sounding more like a poor man's Electric Six than anything. One further effort, Gonzo  which saw them roping in Steve Albini on production (which must be one of the most unlikely collaborations he's ever done) and actually come up with a half-decent effort and they were no more. The group still command an impressively large following to this day though and The Heart Behead You  is their second effort since returning (2020's Burn  being their comeback). And to be fair, it isn't a bad effort. Possibly they've b...

  "Life's a race we're running in and you will die if you don't win so live for the day!"  - Uncle Sam  - Live For The Day Heaven Or Hollywood  is basically the best album that the imperial years Alice Cooper band never wrote. Scummy, nasty and with a seriously sick sense of humour right from that cover (let's just say that in the original version the girl is wearing even less than the censored version we used and leave it at that), it's the sort of album that in a just world would still be being hailed as a sleaze rock classic. Unfortunately, Uncle Sam are another one of those sadly now almost forgotten bands from this genre where bad luck and bad timing has left them as a well hidden secret to be discovered by the lucky few. Hailing from New York, they were arguably on the wrong coast to catch a lift on the whole sleaze rock scene to begin with but nevertheless they certainly gave it a damn good go. They clearly did pick up a bit of a cult following in ...

  "My time's a riddle that won't ever be solved"  - The Vines  - Highly Evolved I've mentioned on here in the past how I wasn't entirely sold on the whole post-millennial garage rock boom, mainly because to me the Strokes and the White Stripes always both seemed ridiculously over-hyped for what they were. However, for some reason I didn't mind the movement's Australian representatives the Vines who emerged around the same time and briefly looked like being the sort of band who would be major players in the game for years to come until their sheer dysfunctionality well and truly saw them sabotage their own career. Listening back to the group's debut album Highly Evolved  for the first time in nearly two decades as I write this, the main thing that strikes me is that it's actually held up pretty well. I think maybe because the group's fall from grace was almost as quick as the rise that preceded it, I was fully expecting it to not be as good ...

  First album in over a decade from Minnesota veterans Urge Overkill, it's good to see Nash Kato and Eddie Roesser back again (sadly long time drummer Blackie Onassis is no longer with the band) with a new effort. Back in the '90s, the group offered a more suave and stylish take on the grunge formula with their Saturation  album and I was intrigued to see, following a respectable previous effort in 2011's Rock 'n' Roll Submarine , how well the old magic was bearing up.  It has to be said, Oui  doesn't get off to a good start with a sloppy cover of Wham's Freedom  which just sounds like a pub covers band trying to do the song and lacks the stardust of the original. The creeping A Necessary Evil  is a better place to start the album with its tale of dysfunctional self-destructive relationships which has exactly the sort of sinister cool that informed UO's best stuff. Overall, Oui  is a workmanlike Urge Overkill album rather than a standout one but that...

  It's good to see Frank Turner back in our midst again - in recent years, the guy has often been there with a welcome arm around the shoulder in hard times on recent albums such as the mournful Be More Kind  and the eye-opening No Man's Land . But with FTHC , he's definitely come up with something of a curveball as he returns to his punk roots. It's there right from the instant that the ferocious two minute opener Non Serviam  knocks you right across the room with its sheer anger. There's little sign of the acoustic-led reflection we've come to expect from Frank down the years, here he's fully plugged in and going for the jugular. Second track The Gathering  is an almost exorcistic outpouring of the frustrations of the lockdown and the anticipation of finally being able to get out there and start playing again. Lead-off single Haven't Been Doing So Well  sees a bit more melody returning with an ode to the hardships a lot of us have been feeling in recen...

  "Lay down your gun, you got fire in your eyes and your web is spun..."  - Cats In Boots  - Her Monkey I think the truth is when you're talking about sleaze rock, especially the '80s variant when major labels were chucking frankly ridiculous sums of money at any band from L.A. with a few cans of aqua net in their bathrooms, that the best bands in the genre basically lived by the maxim "go big or go home". To say that Cats In Boots were a gloriously OTT band even by glam metal standards doesn't even begin to tell this story and in Kicked And Klawed , similar to Love/Hate 's classic Blackout In The Red Room , they came up with a supremely scummy slice of sleaze rock that grabs you by the hair, drags you into the gutter, beats ten shades of shinola out of you and leaves you lying there wondering what just happened. I mean, it had a song called Whip It Out  on it ferfuxxake, need I say more? Cats In Boots were a bit of an odd 'un in that they were a...

  Welcome to the first Singles Bar of the new year - we're officially open for business again! Last month we didn't really have enough stuff to justify doing a Singles Bar but we've chucked the few things from that month along with some newies in here so hopefully there should be something to suit your taste... Anyway, a proper welcome development to start us off as we welcome The Hellacopters  back with a couple of new songs. Reap A Hurricane  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑) is a worthy comeback from Nicke and the guys combining a pounding Stooges style riff with a soaring chorus to remind you exactly why this band were so lauded back in the day. Similarly, Eyes Of Oblivion  is a full throttle stormer powered on by Dregen's spiralling riff and a killer chorus hook. The new album is due in April and on this evidence I think we could potentially have an Album of the Year contender on our hands. Also back with a new single are the U.K. Subs  with Sensei  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑) which cras...

  "We know what we want and we get it from you! We do what we like and we like what we do!"  - Andrew WK - Party Hard I mentioned a few weeks ago while writing the Garbage Days Revisited column on Zodiac Mindwarp how if you're going to be remembered as a one hit wonder then you might as well at least make sure that song is an absolute killer. So it was with Andrew W.K. some fifteen odd years after Zod had his brief brush with fame. There's an oft asked question (well, among the circle of rockers I go for drinks with nowadays anyhow) of "if you could hear a song for the first time again, what would it be?" Well, there's a few but right up there would be this little number... It's easy to forget now but there was a time for about 5 minutes in the dying days of 2001 and early 2002 when Andrew WK was legitimately right there on top of the mountain. The first time you heard Party Hard , it knocked you across the room like a left hook from Tyson - sheer u...

  It's good to see the Diamond Dogs back with the second album since their reunion a decade or so ago. Their comeback album Recall Rock 'n' Roll And The Magic Soul  was a bit of a disappointment to be honest with a mix of hit-and-miss originals and competent but not exactly earth-shattering cover versions. So it kind of feels like there's a bit of pressure here for the band to remind us that they've still got it in the unforgiving climate of 2022. Happy to say it gets off to a storming start with lead-off single Alright Brutus I'm On  being a freewheeling slice of honky tonk rock 'n' roll which fair blasts out of the speakers to put a big grin on your mush. The run keeps up with the Motown-esque What If I Knocked?  which should get your foot tapping along nicely and Everything's Fine  sounding like a great lost cross between the Small Faces' Itchycoo Park  and T-Rex's Metal Guru . I have to be honest, my two big fears going in here were the f...

  Mainstays on the pop-punk scene for the last decade or so, this new release from the Dollyrots is a B-sides and rarities compilation presumably designed to fill in the gaps while we wait for an album proper from the Angeleno trio. Dealing with the rarities album first, it would be easy to think that this would be a collection of disparate songs that doesn't hold together but the big surprise is that it actually holds up well as an album in its own right. Tunes like Too Fun For My Health , Just Like All The Rest  and Be My Leia literally scream "I coulda been a contendah!!" Rocky-style with their big sunny singalongs that would have been hits in the hands of a more commercially fortunate band. Elsewhere, the spiky  Little Miss Impossible  sees their love of the Ramones well and truly being put centre stage with its "woah-oh-oh" refrain, Super Mega Ultraviolet  shows a darker side to their output and the ominous Get Radical even sees them getting all political ...

  "I'm countin' on a future, forgettin' 'bout the past/'Cos knowing you're not honest, well I guessed it couldn't last..."  - Skid Row - You Lie Skid Row were probably one of the first hair metal bands I got into as a kid. I still remember hearing 18 & Life  on Top of the Pops as an 11-year-old and it just sounded incredibly dangerous mixed in with all the PWL stuff that was clogging up the charts at that time. I still love that song to this day and that guitar solo that cuts in midway through from Snake Sabo is an absolute killer. Looking back at ver Row's original run 30 years on though, I have to be honest and say that while they were a band who definitely had their moments ( Youth Gone Wild , Monkey Business , Slave To The Grind ), similar to G'n'R once they’d broken big and got complacent, there was just something a bit too brash and cocky about them that kind of stopped me from being a mega-fan. Sure, they sounded like bad-ass...

  Well, it's been a while since we last did one of these things - clearly the years 1999-2000, far from being a fallow period for music, had more bands who left an impression on me than I thought with several groups from this era meriting their own SFTJ entry! However, as with every era, there were a few bands out there (and similar to last time out, a LOT of Fierce Panda ones!) who briefly made an impression on my listening habits but didn't really stay there either due to breaking up suddenly or just drifting away from me after one brief moment of genius. As I've mentioned in previous SFTJ's, this was very much the "why not?" era of indie music where the demise of Britpop had left a hole at the centre of the scene which at this point hadn't really been filled. And as no-one really knew what was likely to happen next, the general consensus seemed to be that anything was worth taking a chance on if you could see some kind of potential in it which led to so...