Nite Songs

It’s weird to think that it was only just over six months ago that your correspondent was going to his first post-lockdown gig to see the Wildhearts play. Suffice to say that the last few months feels like much longer in terms of what's gone on with this band with numerous difficulties seeing the group going on hiatus and hence we're seeing the return of Ginger's solo gigs backed up by his long term associate Random Jon Poole at the Parish tonight. More of which later. First up tonight we've got a new acoustic alliance making its live debut in the form of Polly & Rags   featuring Idol Dead/Spangles/Phluid frontman Polly and Digressions/Role Models frontman Rags. The pair give a good account of themselves tonight with various numbers from all of their past bands being given a run through (a heartfelt run through the Role Models' This Eventually Leads Nowhere  being the highlight for yours truly) and a new number being given a run-out to good effect as well. Wheth...

  "First of all let’s teach you how to mingle/Then we’ll teach you how to kill..."  - The Cooper Temple Clause  - Who Needs Enemies? The Cooper Temple Clause, similar to King Adora a couple of years previously, were one of those bands who exploded on the scene in a bright supernova flash only to never quite live up to that brilliant early promise that they had. Bursting out of Reading like some twelve-legged nightmare machine, I first became aware of them when their debut single The Devil Walks In The Sand picked up rave reviews in both the NME and Kerrang. Listening back to it now, it still holds up well with the crushing drony guitar riff hammering your brain into pieces. Certainly in an age where most indie bands weren't really packing much of a punch, they definitely stood out. This was early 2002 and there were signs of a UK indie renaissance at this point to counter the Strokes-dominated US wave that had broken the previous year. Along with the likes of the Liberti...

  Maybe the ultimate cult band, it's somewhat reassuring to know that fifteen albums into their career, Wirral indie veterans Half Man Half Biscuit remain their usual scathingly sarcastic selves. With song titles like Tess Of The Dormobiles , Persian Rug Sale At The URC  and Token Covid Song , it really couldn't be anyone other than HMHB really. If there's an overriding theme on The Voltarol Years  then, as the album title suggests, it's the onset of middle age and the depressing realisation that death is creeping up on you. The fact that it starts with I'm Getting Buried In The Morning , an ode to a murderer being sent to the electric chair, is telling and the likes of Big Man Up Front , dealing with a hit and run accident, the self-explanatory Beneath This Broken Headstone  and the reflective closer Oblong Of Dreams which seems to be talking about a dying man's last moments. Yet there's still plenty of room for Half Man Half Biscuit's trademark scabrou...

  One of the most eagerly anticipated albums of the year here at Nite Songs, when Bob Vylan unleashed their debut mini-album We Live Here  in 2020, it was one of the most brutally vicious punk albums for many years but took the genre and gave it a 21st century facelift to devastating effect with its tales of minorities living on the breadline in the face of Daily Mail  style Little Englander racism. It's clear right from opener Wicked And Bad  with its line of "Let's go dig up Maggie's grave and ask her where that milk went"  that the duo certainly haven't mellowed in the last two years. Take That  amps the venom up even further with lines like "Give Churchill's statue the rope and see if it floats" and "Fuck Britannia, burn the queen" . In an age where it seems like the self-appointed arbiters of taste from the Mail to the Guardian are telling us what ordinary people can and can't do at the behest of their political mates, be that ...

  "I must insist on being a pessimist/I'm a loner in a catastrophic mind"  - Green Day  - Armitage Shanks To be honest, this album could easily have gone into one of our early Sounds From The Junkshop columns as it was a regular listen of mine during my teenage years. I was 15 years old when Green Day broke through into the big time with the Dookie  album and the attendant Top 10 hit Basket Case  so it's safe to say I was pretty much exactly their target audience. It's easy to laugh at Green Day nowadays on the other side of the fact that they pretty much abdicated their frat-punk throne (understandably) to go political in the early noughties and have kind of blundered around seemingly perpetually unsure of what they are these days ever since (it always used to amuse me when I heard people referring to them as an emo band just because they'd started wearing eyeliner - I mean had any of these people even heard their stuff from the pre-millennium years? Anyway, ...

It's safe to say that getting Therapy?'s greatest hits tour organised has been something of a trial - the fact that what was supposed to be the "So Much For The 30 Year Plan" tour has ended up becoming the "So Much For The 32 Year Plan" tour thanks to the onset of Covid tells you everything. Still, better late than never and as the band slam into tonight's set with the ferocious assault of  Nausea  which opened their major label debut Nurse , followed by the sinister Stories , it's clear that they're on good form tonight. The nature of Therapy? gigs has definitely changed a bit since your correspondent first saw the band live way way back in 1995 on the first night of the Infernal Love  tour at Leeds Town & Country. Back then, the gigs were a barely suppressed roar of rage like Joy Division (whose Isolation  they cover tonight) squeezed through a Big Black filter - if you were a teenager or twentysomething who'd taken solace in the feral ...

  "And all I know is no-one is my friend/But it's empty at the end/So we start again..."  - Electric Soft Parade - Empty At The End I think what originally drew me to Brighton indie-experimental types the Electric Soft Parade was their much-vaunted love of my old favourites the Boo Radleys . The Boos had split up a couple of years prior to ESP breaking through and I s'pose they'd left a bit of a hole in my listening habits so the prospect of a group coming along to fill it was definitely something that interested me. The group had formed in Brighton around the turn of the millennium (we seem to have been covering a lot of bands from this area in recent SFTJ's - Clearlake were from there as well and Easyworld hailed from just down the coast in Eastbourne) and were based around brothers Alex and Tom White. The pair were taking the tried and tested indie formula and putting an endearingly wonky sort of psychedelic take on it with incredibly catchy hooks and cho...

  Play For Today  is the final album from the Spitfires with the group confirming that they will be splitting up and moving on to new projects afterwards. To be fair, it feels like the right time - the group broke through a decade ago and briefly looked like being the spearheads of a new mod revival which never quite happened. They put out two pretty decent albums (2015's Response  and 2016's A Thousand Times ) but seemed to stall a bit after that with subsequent efforts lacking the spark of those first two.   The irony is that Play For Today  actually shows the band moving their sound forward comfortably - opener Save Me  sounds like a politicised Stone Roses gone ska with its baggy dancebeat and horn section while the trippy flutes on Blaze of Glory  take it into almost acid jazz territory although the scuzzy distorted vocals thankfully stop it drifting too near the dreaded shores of Jamiroquai et al and Don't Look At Me 's paranoid tale of...

  Something of an oddity among the legions of power-pop bands on Rum Bar records, Miss Georgia Peach is an old school country singer who we were introduced to here at Nite Songs via her Do You Know What Love Means?  single last year. Backed by various off-duty members of Nashville Pussy and Nine Pound Hammer, Aloha From Kentucky  takes the tried and tested '50s country template, straps a power-pop rocket to its back (not quite heavy enough to be cowpunk but packing a definite kick) and comes up with something pretty good. The defiance of the likes of Big Iron Skillet  and Don't Come Home Drinkin'  show an fierce feminist anger behind them while the softer Dolly-indebted likes of Adam Neal Waltz  and Don't Stay Away  show a more tender side to Peach's oeuvre. The music is commendably tight here with the wiry boogie of Back Side Of Dallas  rubbing shoulders with the slow-fast dynamics of I Gotta Know . A good two thirds of this album consists of cov...

  "When times are good/When times are bad/Let madness be my epitaph..."  - The Icicle Works  - Shit Creek It's the old favourite among under-rated bands that they're remembered for a song that really wasn't one of their best but just happened to give them by some distance their biggest hit. Such is the case with the Icicle Works, best known over here in the UK for their Top 20 hit Love Is A Wonderful Colour . I have to admit when I heard that song on a few '80s indie compilations, it wasn't one that stuck around in my head for any length of time and just sounded a bit new wave by numbers to me. Unlike a lot of other bands who I did  get into via these compilations, I never really bothered to check them out beyond that initially and that, for the time at least, was that. It was, obviously, the Wildhearts ' fault that this changed when they opted to cover the Icicle Works' Understanding Jane  as part of their Stop Us If You've Heard This One Befo...

  This might just be the most weirdly varied Footnotes to Sounds From The Junkshop that we've done to date. If you look back at the history books then they'll tell you that 2001 was basically the year that the Strokes completely changed the indie landscape for better or worse (you can probably guess which side I'm on in that argument) while on the metal side of things, nu-metal was (thankfully) now starting to die off although its equally ugly half brother frat-punk was still very much in the ascendant. So where does that leave the stuff on the margins then? Well, even though the list below contains a real mish-mash of groups from desperately unlucky old-school indie types through spiky metallers and some bands who were just wonderfully flat-out weird, all of them had one thing in common, namely that they were basically swimming upstream from the word go trying to do something that wasn't in vogue at the time. Except that while, as we've discussed on the 1999-2000 F...

  "I wish for a nice existence/One with no hard work for instance.."  - Clearlake - I Want To Live In A Dream Although by 2001, it's safe to say that my interest in indie music was very much waning, there was still the odd band who managed to break through my defences and Clearlake, similar to Easyworld and Chris T-T , both of whom we've covered on here in recent weeks, were one of the last few bands of this genre who I genuinely found myself enjoying before I finally gave up on the NME and indie music and wandered off into heavier waters not to return until well over a decade later. Listening back to their first and best album Lido  some twenty years after the fact, it's pretty clear that these Brighton natives weren't really breaking any new ground but there's something about these tales of smalltown boredom that I think I related to back then. As I've mentioned in the last few SFTJ's, by this point I had left university behind and found myself ...

  The rise of the Mysterines in recent months has been a rapid one with the group coming up through the ranks over the last couple of years to the point where they're now selling out decent sized venues on tour and being touted by many as the next big thing in British alternative rock. Weirdly the first band that the Mysterines reminded me of upon listening to opening track Life's A Bitch (But I Love It So Much) is mid-'90s post-grunge rockers Solar Race with the frenetic clanging guitars and Lia Metcalfe's vocals owing a definite nod to the late Eilidh Bradley's defiant scowl. However, although Reeling is definitely grunge influenced, it's got a refreshing rawness to it which sees it much more in line with the feral scuzziness of Mudhoney or early Nirvana than the over-polished hollow chest-beating of the Stone Temple Pilots or Pearl Jam. The pummelling Hung Up  and the sludgy riff of The Bad Thing  have a real heart-on-sleeve fury to them which leaves you in n...