Nite Songs

  With Last Great Dreamers having gone on a temporary hiatus at present, we find ourselves with both of the group's main songwriters - frontman Marc Valentine and guitarist Slyder Smith - putting out solo albums this summer. We've already looked at Marc's effort last month and a fine effort it was too so I was intrigued to hear what Slyder would have come up with. Charm Offensive , as it turns out, is an agreeably straightforward power pop effort. While the Dogs D'Amour meets Steve Marriott slyness of Calico Lady and I'm Done  are reasonable enough, it's track three When The Rain Comes  that really sees the band hitting fifth gear before a slow countrified reworking of LGD's Crash Landing In Teenage Heaven  shows the group's more methodical side to good effect. The slow building I Don't Want To Run  (complete with banjo) has an almost spaghetti western feel to it while Maya has a bit of a Beatlesy/Oasis vibe going on (and I mean that in a good way I ...

  Something of a legendary underground band in their heyday, I'll be honest and say that my knowledge of the Dream Syndicate pretty much begins and ends at their best known album The Days Of Wine And Roses  and its attendant minor hit Tell Me When It's Over which seems to crop up on a lot of '80s garage and US indie compilations. Mixing garage rock sensibilities with a more off the wall Velvet Underground influence, they were a bit of an acquired taste to these ears but there's no doubt that when they nailed it they most definitely could nail it. Just under forty years on from that moment and the group are back. And interestingly, while the Velvet Underground influence is definitely still present (not least in the Lou Reed style vocals), Ultraviolet Battle Hymns...  offers a more nuanced take on the formula to good effect - Where I'll Stand  is all dreamy electronica and Damian  could almost be a distant cousin of Sweet Jane  with its languid guitar riff. T...

  "Well life's a drag and then you're dead/It's just me and the boys and a bottle of red/Tellin' lies about better days ahead"  - Demolition 23  - Hammersmith Palais After last week's look back at Andy McCoy's various misadventures through the '80s and '90s , I thought that it would be a good opportunity to look at his Hanoi Rocks co-accused Michael Monroe's adventures during this time period. I've kind of touched on Mike's solo career in these pages already when we did a GDR on his Whatcha Want? album (his final solo effort before rejoining Hanoi in the early noughties) but following the group's messy dissolution in 1985, he would head out to the States with the aim of kickstarting a solo career. The result of this would be 1987's Nights Are So Long album featuring a good mix of originals ( Too Rich To Be Good ) and covers (takes on the Heavy Metal Kids' She's No Angel , the Flamin' Groovies' Shake Some A...

  "I'm gonna kick your arse/You've got a lot to lose"  - Winnebago Deal  - Shank Fight In M City Trust me, it's difficult to do yer typical lyrical quote for an SFTJ entry when most of the band you're dealing with's lyrics are nigh-on incomprehensible. But that was always what made Winnebago Deal so great - they were a brutal blast of force, about as subtle as a brick to the face but with a sheer sense of chaos that set them aside from nearly everything else I was listening to in 2003. The group started out on Fierce Panda records with the Manhunt  single which I remember picking up when it came out and it properly blew me away - a real blast of punk-thrash energy with its insistent chorus of "Hunted, hunted down/Get that son of a bitch outta town!" . The B-side Shank Fight In M-City was even better, going from its frenetic thrash into an ominous bass rumble for the middle part then building up for the big full throttle finale. A mini-album, Plat...

Something of a punk supergroup, Ultrabomb feature the talents of ex-Husker Du man Greg Norton and former UK Subs drummer Jamie Oliver in their ranks and after three promising singles, Time To Burn  marks their debut album. As evidenced on the opening title track, this is very much a band playing to its strengths with the barrelling rhythms being reminiscent of a Dropkick Murphys who'd never heard of Irish folk music. Not bad. However, just in case you were about to tap this one down as predictable, Fear Your Gods  quickly enters into the fray with a slow-building slice of menace which quickly picks up from an almost Mission style verse to a full on thrash chorus before former single  Star  and the frenetic I Can Make It both hark back to Norton's Husker Du past. And so it continues throughout - while the spirit of Mould and Hart does hang heavy over this album, Ultrabomb are also savvy enough to vary the formula up enough that you'd never mistake them for a bunch of ...

  We first encoutered the Cheerbleederz via their Cute As Hell  single on Alcopop records a couple of months back with its fuzzed-up indie punk stalkerisms being an intriguing prospect. Suffice to say that their debut album is equally enjoyably all over the place. I always remember reading a quote from , I think, Andy Partridge from XTC where he said that sometimes the most interesting music comes from bands where it feels like their music is a pool ball ricocheting around the table which doesn't quite go in one of the holes and Cheerbleederz are definitely a case in point. The fierce feminism on show here is reminiscent of groups like the Linda Lindas and Berries but there's a weird kind of slacker vibe to it which recalls the Pixies at their most schizophrenic. Songs like Break Ur Arm ,  Nail Biters  and Out Of Body  have those sort of meandering Debaser  style guitars to them with the vocals veering from Bjork style quirkiness to full on screeching. They...

  "Welcome to Silicon City, it's all tits 'n' ass to me/Where Tropicana mud wrestlers marry rockstars, must be some social disease...L.A. sleaze (ugh!)"  - Shooting Gallery  - Restless It's been a bit of a busy summer for the former members of Hanoi Rocks with new albums surfacing from both Michael Monroe (who lest we forget has Sami Yaffa in his band nowadays) and Nasty Suicide (or Stenfors as he's now known). So it seemed like a good opportunity to fill in a few of the gaps in the story which we briefly touched on many moons ago here on Garbage Days Revisited. I'm going to do a quick look back at  Michael Monroe 's output in the '90s next week here with a revisit of one of his most overlooked moments but this week, we're taking a look at the Keef to his Mick, Andy McCoy. I s'pose Andy McCoy has always been the loose cannon in Hanoi, clearly influenced by Keef Richards and Johnny Thunders (and with a lot of their bad habits as we...

  "While our egos grow/While the bullshit flows/It goes on and on and on/Get my coat I've had enough, take me out of this place..."  - American Heartbreak  - Somebody Similar to Broken Teeth who we covered on here a few weeks ago, American Heartbreak were formed out of the ashes of a group of '80s Sunset Strip also-rans who came together to well and truly surpass themselves by creating something special. The group was put together by guitarist Billy Rowe who'd previously had five minutes of almost-fame with his late '80s San Francisco turned Sunset Strip band Jetboy. Jetboy were a weird one - a prime example of a group who by all rights should have been world-beaters but somehow the sum ended up being a fair bit less than the parts. They were formed as a sort of New York Dolls influenced glam-punk band (as the name suggests) by Rowe and fellow guitarist Fernie Rod, mohawked frontman Mickey Finn and bassist Todd Crew who'd been in an early G'n'R l...

  Rum Bar Records seem to have gone into a bit of a busy spell recently with this being the third album from them that we've reviewed in these webpages in as many weeks after quite a long quiet spell with the soul power rock 'n' roll of the Magnificent and the agreeably straightforward glam-punk of the Legendary Swagger both making their way on to our review desk of late. Boston natives the Gypsy Moths are a bit of a less straightforward proposition with the horn-soaked power-pop of Effortlessly  reminding me a bit of the Saints' '80s output ( Follow The Leaders etc) before Slow Healer  goes for an almost disco style feel (although if you're of a certain vintage then you may find it difficult to get 10cc's terrible  Dreadlock Holiday  out of your head while listening to it!) and These Days Will Run  has that pounding drum intro which recalls the Spencer Davis Group's Keep On Runnin' . The main standout track on the album is The Continuing Story of Ar...

Mainstays on the Britrock scene at the end of the last millennium, Janus Stark would return to the fray a couple of years ago with a solid comeback effort in Angel From The Flames  ( Nite Songs review here ) which at least showed they were still about. However, on the evidence of Face Your Biggest Fear , there's been a bit of a quality jump in the interim. Quite simply, this is a good quality Britrock album with some rock solid rhythms and excellent guitar work from long serving co-frontman/six stringer Giz Butt (former Midget man Richard Gombault handling vocal duties on some of the tracks as well as rhythm guitar duties). The likes of Father Time  (with some very astute observational lyrics about morality) and the rolling groove of Eddie 'n' Larkin  are great stuff which the likes of Massive Wagons et al would've given their right arms to have written. The high quality stays consistent throughout ranging from the melodic One More Ghost  and Reassuring  to the ...

  "I have so much to say but so little time to stay..."  - Mott The Hoople  - Angel Of Eighth Avenue Well, it's official, we have a new winner. For over a year now, the Dictators' Go Girl Crazy! has held the record of being the oldest album to feature in Garbage Days Revisited but today we're heading even further back than those hazy days of proto-punk to what I guess you could call proto-glam. Of course, everybody knows Mott the Hoople for their glam rock years from 1972-74 when the band had their biggest run of success with the likes of All The Young Dudes , Honaloochie Boogie , All The Way From Memphis , Roll Away The Stone , Golden Age Of Rock 'n' Roll etc but what a lot of people don't know is that by the time the first of those songs became a hit, the group had already put out four albums, split up and hastily reformed again. So today, we're going to look at Wildlife , the best of the albums from that era as well as a quick peek at some of ...

  There was just enough material in here to make the Singles Bar a two parter this month not least due to a couple of what seems to have been a bit of a dying breed this year, EP's, landing on our review desk. Let's investigate 'em further, shall we?... *** GIRLS IN SYNTHESIS - "Konsumrausch" Let's start off with the dark side of this month's duo - Girls In Synthesis' Now Here's An Echo From Your Future  ended up being one of our Top 10 albums of 2020 but subsequent singles never quite topped that album's dark but fierce take on post-punk. I'll be honest, the fact that the group's new EP Konsumrauch  kicks off with a nine minute plus track in the form of Pulling Teeth  had me fearing the worst but at least this one packs a bit of menace into its decidedly lengthy duration with the scuzzy I Wanna Be Your Dog  style riff and the shouted vocals being reminiscent of Idles before they jumped the shark with their last album. Of the other trac...

  Summer in the city and the air is still as Aztec Camera once sang. Though not that still over here as we've got a bumper crop of new releases in this month's Singles Bar - we'll have a couple of EP's later this morning but for now let's get started by pouring a cold one and looking at the singles themselves... *** We could only really start with a new effort from Ginger Wildheart & The Sinners  really as Lately Always  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗) represents the second release from their upcoming debut album due in October. Ginger's spoken of the Sinners as being an outlet for the much-loved country-influenced side of his output and while its predecessor Wasted Times  didn't quite showcase this, great though it was, this is more what you might be expecting, a gentle mid-paced effort which is a perfect soundtrack to those lazy summer evenings chilling out in the garden. Great stuff as you'd expect. Bandcamp Link *** Ginger's not the only member of the Wildheart...