Album Review: The Roughneck Riot - "Burn It To The Ground"

 

Warrington's Roughneck Riot were a band who genuinely looked like ones to keep your eye on in the early years of the last decade. Emerging in the late noughties around the same time as the not entirely dissimilar Ferocious Dog, they put out two storming albums in the form of 2014's This Is Our Day and 2016's Out Of Anger before abruptly going on hiatus soon after the latter. However, the last 12 months has seen them resume activity with their long-awaited third album now seeing the light of day.

The first thing you notice about Burn It To The Ground is that this is a much more feral and raw Roughneck Riot than disappeared off our radar half a decade or so ago as evidenced by the snarling opener We're Still Here - it's certainly a world apart from the more sedate and gentle likes of Skinny Lister especially with lyrics like "It's gone too far, we can't ignore now fascism is at the door" on Stay Awake. This group are less about Ferocious Dog style tales of historical injustice and more about anger in the here and now.

There's a real righteous anger to this album with the likes of A New Day Is Dawning, The Reckoning and No Cure For Us desperately exhorting the sleepwalking population of this septic isle to wake up and do something about the hell in a handcart we're being sent to before it's too late. The desolate lament of We've Already Lost shows that they can vary the tempo up to good effect too. It's a good reminder of what made the Roughneck Riot stand out from the crowd a decade or so ago and it's just as depressingly relevant now as it was then. If not even more so.

Packed full of righteous anger, ferociously tight music and an increasing desperation at the state of this country, Burn It To The Ground is one of the best albums I've heard in the opening weeks of this year. Welcome back guys, we've missed you.

Bandcamp Link (Stream & LP purchase only)

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Album Review: The Fades - "Night Terrors"

Image
  Hailing from South London, the Fades are gaining a reputation of one of the premier garage rock bands in the capital these days and, as with a few albums we've reviewed in these webpages of late, Night Terrors  was written during the lockdown as it was a recurring feature of life for the band's frontman Dave during the lockdown. As befits its title and subject matter, Night Terrors  is an off-kilter effort which might take a few listens to get into but rewards those who persevere with it. Certainly, the discordant vocals and guitars often give the impression of the whole operation being on the verge of collapse on the likes of The Pessimist  and Known It All Along  while Lost My Job  goes into XTC/Nightingales style post-punk territory. However, the likes of People In General  show that they can rein the weirdness in and build up an intriguing multi-part epic which starts off as tuneful new wave before drifting into a nightmarish state-of-the-nation ...
Read more