Album Review: Reef - "Shoot Me Your Ace"

 

I have to be honest, I wasn't what you'd call a particularly big fan of Reef back in the day despite their status as one of the most successful Britrock bands of the mid-'90s. To me, with every wave of Britrock it always seemed that there was one band who were just a bit too no-frills for their own good and lacked the whole showmanship/willingness to think outside the box that their better contemporaries had in favour of "keep it real man!" trad dullness and, as Thunder were to the Quireboys/Dogs D'Amour wave around the start of the decade so Reef were to the Wildhearts/Terrorvision/Therapy? driven mid-'90s variant. The fact that last time I saw them a few years ago on the infamous Britrock Must Be Destroyed tour with the Wildhearts and Terrorvision, where they were placed as the headlining band only for about half the audience to have headed for the exit door by the time they took the stage, probably didn't help matters either to be honest.

However, I have to say that Shoot Me Your Ace was actually a bit of a pleasant surprise. Yes, it's still the unashamedly trad rock take you'd expect on Britrock from Reef and Gary Stringer's laryngitis inducing roar of a voice is as much of a Marmite affair as ever but at least on this occasion they're doing it well - tracks like Refugee, I See Your Face and Best Of Me at least pack enough energy and strut to give the impression that this is a band enjoying themselves (I could be wrong but it even sounds like they're gently poking fun at their public image on Wolfman showing an all too rare sense of humour for bands like this). Particularly notable is the guitar interplay between the band's two new boys, Jesse Wood (son of Ronnie) and ex-Duran Duran/Power Station man Andy Taylor (now there's an odd mix for you! Definitely works though) which gives these songs an extra layer and adds to their appeal. At the other end of the scale, Right On definitely shows off the group's ear for a melody as well.

If we really must have trad rock in the musical scheme of things (and I fear we must) then at least let it be albums like this where the band at least sound like they're having a blast doing what they do and cutting loose a bit rather than engaging in some tedious Led Zep box-ticking exercise. The likes of Greta Van Fleet could definitely learn a few lessons from Shoot Me Your Ace put it that way.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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 #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