Album Review: Steve Vincent - "Recovered From My Past"

 

Best known as the frontman of Brit sleaze perennials Paradise Alley, this is the first solo album from Steve Vincent. I have to be honest, Steve's day job band are one of those who I've heard of but don't recall hearing anything by but the general signs here appeared to be promising with a guest list including the Wildhearts' Danny McCormack, ex-Dolls and current Mike Monroe guitarist Steve Conte and McCormack's old Main Grains bandmate (along with several others) Ben Marsden.

The first thing to be aware of here though is that if you're expecting a Soho sleaze by numbers affair then you might just be in for a bit of a surprise. If anything, Recovered From My Past sails closer to the shores of power pop or the vintage strain of '80s Brit-glam (the Babysitters, Soho Roses, Torme, Marionette etc) with a healthy dash of early Hanoi Rocks in there as well. Certainly the harmonica honking likes of Yesterday's Man, Last Train To Babylon and Can't Bring Me Down have that intoxicating mix of glam swagger, Buzzcocks indebted singalongability and endearingly rough-edged punk production while Vincent and his band sound tight and focused throughout to keep Recovered From My Past rolling along nicely through its 35-odd minutes. By the time it closes with the singalong Sleepwalking and the mournful acoustics of Lost Boys & Fallen Angels, you should be well on the way to being converted.

Oh sure, it isn't anything you won't have heard before but at least Vincent has taken a well-worn formula and executed it in fine style here. If you remember those happy days when the Soho strand of glam rock had its own separate identity before the post-millennial variant where everyone was trying too hard to be Motley Crue came along then Recovered From My Past should evoke some happy memories for you. Or indeed for anyone who likes their scuzz-rock with a sweet centre to it.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sounds From The Junkshop #18 - Heavy Stereo

Image
  "So here's to a happy landing, wherever we're fallin' to..."  - Heavy Stereo  - Cartoon Moon , 1996 Let's be honest, it all started to go wrong for Oasis when they started to swallow the "new Beatles" hype wholesale. Well that and when they started developing a worrying predilection for tedious blues jams but that's a whole other story. I blame Paul Weller meself. The thing about Definitely Maybe was, y'see, yes there was definitely a Beatles influence there (I mean on the likes of Live Forever and Up In The Sky you can't really miss it) but there was so much more going on there as well. On that one, the Gallaghers owed arguably more to the '70s glam stomp of T-Rex and Slade ( Cigarettes and Alcohol for the former, Rock 'n' Roll Star for the latter) or the scuzzy sneer of the Pistols ( Bring It On Down ) than they did to the Fab Four. Their critics may have derided them as such but a Lennon & McCartney tribute band ...
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

Sounds From The Junkshop #46 - Bis

Image
  "If it's not worth pretending then I don't wanna know..."  - Bis   - Eurodisco There's an argument that we should possibly have covered Bis a bit earlier in SFTJ some time around the entries for 1996 or so rather than now as we enter 1999 as this was when they had their biggest success and their five minutes of infamy. Bursting on the scene just as Britpop was at its peak, their none more lo-fi aesthetic which harked back to a decade before brought them plaudits and derision in pretty much equal amounts. I remember my younger sister absolutely loved them and I ended up borrowing her copy of the group's debut album New Transistor Heroes  mainly just to see what the fuss was about. Although it wasn't deserving of some of the scathing reviews it got, I thought it was good but not brilliant. Certainly Bis were very much a Marmite band with the keyboard bleeps, wannabe-cutesy lyrics about sweetshops etc and screechy vocals putting a lot of people off but in a...
Read more