The Nite Songs Singles Bar - August 2022 Part 2 (EP's)

 

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 tracks, I was a bit lukewarm on Enveloped when we reviewed it as a single and unfortunately time hasn't really improved it as the tinny drum machines and barked vocals don't really gel together. Bypassing is similarly heavy and ominous with its pounding bass and jarring sound effects and The Engine has a real stark panic attack kind of feel to it.

The main problem with Konsumrauch is that while Now Here's An Echo... had a ferocity underpinning it that grabbed you by the neck and wouldn't let you go, here Girls In Synthesis just don't seem to have quite the same quality of hooks to really draw you in. It's still a decent effort but it feels like either a bit of a step down or case of "seen it all before" depending on your point of view. GIS are definitely as uncompromising as ever here but you do start to wonder if we've maybe seen all that they can offer by now...

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

***

CONTINENTAL LOVERS - "Dale Arden vs The World"


And here's the light side of this month's duo. We first encountered the Continental Lovers a few months ago with their It Really Doesn't Matter single which was one of the better releases of the month in question. Their debut EP is now here and I'm pleased to report it's another good 'un. Five tracks and 14 minutes of catchy as hell power-pop which kicks in with the two minute blast of Tape Deck which could easily be a lost Duncan Reid & The Big Heads single and the aforementioned It Really Doesn't Matter before Tattered Star, St Joan and Can't Get Her Out Of My Head follow up in the best "get in there, say what ya gotta say and get out again" Buzzcocks style.

It's only the closing title track (an ode to Flash Gordon's girlfriend) at four minutes long which really deviates from the formula but still packs a killer chorus (complete with handclaps) and shows that the band are definitely capable of growing beyond these simplistic roots. You'd like to think that when the Continental Lovers get on to making their full album proper, we'll see a few more tracks like this one but for now, the songs on this EP are a great collection of straight up Ramones-ian knucklehead pop-punk the way all the best kind of music like this should be. For any fans of this sort of music, this is pretty much a must-have.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

***

And thus we leave the Singles Bar for another month. Enjoy the rest of your summer and we'll see you for the first autumn visit to this establishment in September.

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

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