Album Review: Star Botherers - "Tales Of Layton Rakes"

 

Hailing from Nottinghamshire, the Star Botherers are another folk-punk to go along with the likes of Ferocious Dog and Skinny Lister in the field with Tales Of Layton Rakes being their second album. They're certainly closer soundwise to Ferocious Dog with a down to earth working class take on the genre which provides a nice contrast to some of the more posh-boy bands who've muddied these waters in the last decade or so.

There's a very angry political invective buried in these songs under a seemingly innocuous gentle folk-punk backing with the self-explanatory Spoons and Blackpool taking potshots at pub violence, Let It Stand being a righteous polemic against Thatcherism and its legacy and Just Around The Corner and Another Lidl Song being laments about how easy it is to get caught in the poverty cycle when you least expect it. Elsewhere, 13 Years In Oregon and A Sailor's Grave are Ferocious Dog style tales of historical injustice.

No Scarlet Rebels style fudging of things here then - this is more akin to a poppier Levellers with the likes of Silence Is Acceptance and Kyle & Norton (a look at how different standards apply to celebrities and working class people on the telly). Although they do find time to slip in the odd bit of humour in the likes of Oddly Excluded, He's Got Dreads and Swearing In Songs.

Overall, Tales Of Layton Rakes can be safely filed next to Ferocious Dog's The Hope and the Levellers' Peace as a good example of fiery heart-on-sleeve folk punk that shows that this genre still has plenty of fuel left in it when it's done right. Good stuff.

Bandcamp Link

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