Album Review: The Kut - "Grit"

 

The Kut are one of those bands who suddenly seem to have made a pretty huge leap up commercially in the last year or two. Having come up through the London rock bar scene alongside the likes of Healthy Junkies and Yur Mum about half a decade or so ago, they put out a solid debut album in the form of 2018's Valley Of Thorns but with the group moving up in the world, the pressure's on a bit here for the music to reflect their added commercial presence (tube ads an' all).

Opening track Animo is a solid effort with its chugging riff and Mahi's vocals reminding me a bit of Syteria for some reason which isn't a bad thing. The vocoder on the chorus is a bit hard on the ears though! Second track Burn Your Bridges is a bit better with its laid back slacker menace coming across like L7 in one of their poppier moments before building up to a screamalong chorus.

Grit keeps up an impressively varied output throughout from the driving riff of Not Here For Love to the more loose-limbed shuffle of Brother (even if you may have to try and get Bon Jovi's Keep The Faith out of your brain while listening to it!). They've definitely got an ear for a good pop hook as well as Runaways and And 1 More both demonstrate and even the shameless power balladry of Satellite works better than it really has any right to. The only slight red light is that a couple of tracks drift towards being a bit generic later on in the album but even on these they manage to pack a suitably decent hook on them to prevent this becoming too much of an issue.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what to expect from this album - there's been a lot of cases down the years of a band getting extra commercial backing and their output suffering but the Kut have definitely wrong-footed those who might have expected them to go down this route. Grit does what every good second album should do by building on the best bits from Valley Of Thorns and adding a few new twists and turns to the formula to come up with something genuinely good. Consider me impressed.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

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