Nite Songs

  "They always try to blame it on the blacks/But it's really those in power who will stab you in the back"  - Newtown Neurotics  - Living With Unemployment It probably says a lot about my political beliefs that we've covered a fair few left wing fireband bands in both Sounds From The Junkshop and Garbage Days Revisited columns past from the Clash's Sandinista! through the Angelic Upstarts (RIP Mensi), Carter USM and Pop Will Eat Itself 's Dos Dedos Mi Amigos up to the likes of One Minute Silence , Pitchshifter and King Prawn in the early noughties. You could probably add the obvious likes of Billy Bragg in there as well (I've just not done a column on him yet as my favourite albums of his seem to be the same ones that get rightly acclaimed elsewhere like Brewing Up and Don't Try This At Home so I couldn't really call them under-rated). I guess it comes from growing up in a Teesside family relocated to West Yorkshire but I had the traditiona...

  "Like Jimmy Carter, like electric underwear/A canny idea that never had the chance to go anywhere..."  - Electric Six  - Jimmy Carter One thing you find when you're putting SFTJ's together, especially for the years where your memory's a bit...erm, waxed shall we say, is that you often find yourself having to move the timelines you thought were correct around in your head a bit. For example, as we move on to 2003, I'd kind of had it in my head that the garage rock revival headed up by the Strokes and the White Stripes had already started to peter out the previous year. Looking at some of the entries we've got coming up in the next few weeks, I may have remembered that slightly wrong as there's definitely a few bands who fall into that category coming up in the near future. For this entry though, we're moving west from New York to Detroit. Electric Six were one of a number of bands who broke through in 2003-04 sort of time thanks to Jack White'...

  Very much not a band afraid of controversy, the SoapGirls are one of those bands where you do start to worry that their public image could be a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it certainly gets your attention but you do occasionally worry that they're in danger of becoming "that band who are more famous for hardly wearing any clothes than for their music". And it's a shame because with In My Skin , the SoapGirls have delivered arguably their strongest effort to date with a more melodic approach as evidenced on the Go-Go's style opener Breathe  and the sinister chugging Demons  (which sounds oddly like a glammed-up Amy Winehouse fronting Garbage) proving the girls' knack with a catchy chorus and a good hook. The only drawback to In My Skin  is that at 14 tracks and 62 minutes and most of the tracks veering close to or over the five minute mark, it's arguably a bit overlong for its own good and some of the later tracks like Summer Rain  and P...

  It's safe to say that the Nova Twins' profile has skyrocketed in the last couple of years with their debut album, 2020's Who Are The Girls? , looking certain to clean up until Covid grounded everything. Nevertheless, the group are back unbowed with their sophomore effort Supernova . Similar to groups like the Skints and Sonic Boom Six, the Nova Twins' schtick is to mix dub rhythms with punk attitude. Except they offer a much heavier take on the formula than either of the above with the bludgeoning riffs on the likes of former single Antagonist  and album highlight  Choose Your Fighter  almost going into full-on Nine Inch Nails territory. The group have the brutal attitude to match on the lyrics to KMB  which turns the whole Eminem murdered girlfriend song on its head to vicious effect or the menacing bass-heavy Toolbox and the unbridled anger of Enemy . If there's a slight downside to this album, it's that the Nova Twins' formula does start to get a bit re...

  "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...

  Looking back from two decades' distance, 2002 was a weird year and This Footnotes column is likely to be a little more, how shall we say, obscure than the ones that have come before. As 2002 rolled around, I was now out of the other side of Uni and drifting between various jobs (most of which were either warehouse or bottom of the rung admin employment) and accommodations (a fallout with my parents led to me essentially being a bed and breakfast man for a good bit of this year before finally settling in with some bandmates in a house in Kirkstall which was basically rotting away from the inside) Luckily though, as the internet started to expand, other places started to spring up aside from the obvious two to    get my fix  of good new music. My Wildhearts fandom had led me to the excellent Five Miles High webzine (run by Darren Stockford who'd previously run Ginger 's Silver Ginger site) while as I've mentioned elsewhere, it was also around this time that I...

  "Bud, Jack, speed, pills, loose girls, cheap thrills, I've got 24 hours to kill..."  - Kitty Hudson - 24 Hours To Kill If the history of Sounds From The Junkshop should have taught you anything dear reader, it's that while some of the bands we cover on here had a brief moment in the sun only to disappear back underground soon afterwards, there were also a fair few who never really graduated beyond the toilet circuit and remained a secret known to only those who bothered to seek them out.  Similar to our earlier columns on the Dead Pets and Zombina & The Skeletones , Kitty Hudson are another one of those bands who your correspondent pretty much happened upon by happy accident. To the best of my knowledge, they never made the pages of Kerrang or Classic Rock and at this point we were still a good decade or so away from magazines like Vive Le Rock, which would probably have been more their natural territory, from existing. But the truth is that they put out a brac...

  18 months may be a commendably quick turnaround time between albums but in the fickle world of the music business it can seem like an eternity if you're unlucky with your timings. When TV Priest unleashed their debut album Uppers  in February last year, they were clearly aligning themselves with the uncompromising political post-punk scene that Idles and Fontaines DC had taken overground in the previous 12 months and it seemed like a smart move even if they weren't quite on the same level as the former's Ultra Mono  or the latter's A Hero's Death . A bit of fine tuning and the theory would seem to have been that they'd be well placed to surf the wave with the follow-up. Unfortunately the time period since has seen both Idles and Fontaines deliver underwhelming follow up albums with the former's Crawler  and the latter's Skinty Fia  being pale copies of what had come before, jettisoning the hooks and intrigue for blaring irritating atonalism and tuneles...

  Named after the Richmond district of San Francisco which they hail from, my initial thoughts from the band name were that the Richmond Sluts would be a group of old school Thunders/Joneses devotees with the requisite sneered vocals, scuzzy riffs and punk attitude. As it turned out I was very wrong but the reality isn't bad either. Basically what we're dealing with here is an American take on the whole latter day pub rock formula with tight rhythms, drawled vocals and Small Faces keyboards combining to give Psychoactive Sounds  an air of smoky cool. If you remember early '80s r'n'b pub rockers the Inmates then think a Californian version and you're not too far off. Tunes like Top Of The Night  and the intergalactic themed A Push  cruise by with the rhythms to make your toe tap and bring a smile to your face. There's times such as on Killin' Eyes where the vocals here sound almost like some sort of weird cross between Bryan Ferry's lounge lizard croo...

  Kubix Day 1 Review here And so on to Day 2 of Kubix. While yesterday was a fairly slow-paced opening day to the festival, today proves to be a lot more busy with several stage clashes. In the interest of covering as much as possible, please be aware that for quite a few of the bands I've reviewed here, I didn't catch the full set due to hot footing it to/from the other stage. But hopefully I've done this justice... It's weird how a nice sunny day (a stark contrast to yesterday which alternated between clouds and rain) can make even bands you weren't a fan of first time out seem pleasant enough and Republica , who open the Main Stage today, are a case in point. Back when I was 18, I generally found their Essex girl techno-Britpop about as much fun as root canal surgery without the anaesthetic but today they're enjoyable enough with an energy and enthusiasm to their set that means you'd have to be a bit of a miserable bugger not to enjoy it. They play the hi...