Album Review: Bela & The Lugosis - "Vampire Kiss"

 

Hailing from Glasgow, Bela & The Lugosis describe themselves as a "neo-goth-glam-punk band" which is pretty much a slam dunk in terms of the music we enjoy covering here at Nite Songs so it's safe to say that we were pretty soundly intrigued when Vampire Kiss landed in our inbox.

It gets off to a bit of an odd start with We're Getting It On sounding like Adam & The Ants' Prince Charming but not of the same quality - it sounds more like an intro track stretched out to three minutes than an opener proper. That duly arrives though with The Heart Makes Love Possible which combines chiming Buzzcocks guitars with Bowie style vocals in a way that really has no right to work but somehow does.

Vampire Kiss is an endearingly odd album - listening to a track like She Moves Me which takes a Sisters-style overwrought goth ballad then whacks pounding '70s glam rock drums (complete with handclaps!) on it, you certainly can't accuse this group of playing things safe! As you'd maybe expect, there's a few times where the ingredients don't quite sit right - Happiness Is A Warm Body is a brave attempt whacking goth dramatics onto a big '60s style ballad which unfortunately just doesn't really go anywhere and No Meat Monday is just throwaway but the likes of the stomping Patricia Villas and the sinister Like A Hurricane show what they can do when they get the formula right.

I get the impression that Bela & The Lugosis are more of a work in progress than the finished article at the moment but this is certainly a band with plenty of potential. With a bit of extra focus and maybe a bigger recording budget (if someone's willing to take a chance on 'em, I can certainly think of worse bands to back!) next time out then I feel that they genuinely could come up with something amazing. For now, they're a slightly messy but enjoyably scuzzy group of ghoul rockers in training. Keep an eye on 'em.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

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