Album Review: Pete Bentham & The Dinner Ladies - "What's On The Inside Has To Come Out"

 

Liverpool natives Pete Bentham & The Dinner Ladies are one of those bands who I seem to have encountered a lot of times down the years, usually as a support band at a punk gig somewhere but amazingly, this is the first time I've found myself actually listening to one of their albums. They've always been an entertaining band when I've seen them in the live arena so I was interested to see how this one would pan out.

Lurking somewhere in the middle ground between the Buzzcocks' tuneful pop-punk angst and the Television Personalities' endearingly shambolic early stuff, What's On The Inside Has To Come Out is a fun 35 minutes of no-nonsense DIY pop-punk which brings back memories of everyone from the Ramones to X-Ray Spex (via the Lora Logic style sax on a lot of the tracks). Similar to a male version of Helen Love, Bentham is a guy with a good ear for lyrics which capture the ordinary (as the Jona Lewie-referencing I'm Shy shows) and the likes of Money And Art show that they can expand their horizons beyond the standard three chord thrash when the mood takes them. Though having said that, the gleeful vitriol of Life Is Beautiful shows that they can kick out the jams nicely when the mood takes them.

Not everything lands - their DIY approach does sometimes mean the Dinner Ladies blunder into being a bit too off key for their own good and some of the songs like Elvis In My Dreams are just dull but overall, this is a perfectly likeable album for anyone with a good ear for down to earth Scouse wit and a ramshackle DIY approach.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

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