Nite Songs Top 100 Albums Of 2022: Part 2 (50-41)
Okay, time for the big hitters - we did the first half of our Top 100 albums yesterday and now it's ten a day from now until the New Year. Settle down and let's see how the first part of our Top 50 unfolds, shall we?...
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50. THE KUT - "Grit"
Grit saw the Kut deliver an album more than worthy of their commercial step up in the world, ironing out their old inconsistencies to deliver a well-rounded effort packing plenty of variety and some great tunes and hooks to boot from the driving riff of Not Here For Love to the shameless power ballad of Satellite. The sound of a band very much arriving.
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Something of a local legend in her home state of Minnesota thanks to her '80s band the Clams, New Tricks is an album that deserves to take Cindy Lawson to a wider audience. Mixing spiky pop-punk, Runaways style gang chants and even the odd bit of grunge and shoegazing for good measure, this is an album with its fingers in many musical pies but one which always comes out with the tunes and hooks to make it a more than worthwhile listen.
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Similar to groups like the Hip Priests, South Wales natives Deathtraps are a pure nihilistic howl set to some suitably bonecrunching rock 'n' roll riffs and Appetite For Prescription was a more than worthy follow-up to their debut Stole Your Rock 'n' Roll, savaging reality TV stars, bible bashers and NWOCR bores with equal abandon. A defiant scream from a band kicking back against the pricks to thriling effect.
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A very different beast to GTA's first album Blame Everyone but a fine effort in its own right as Jay Butler and Ritch Battersby put their extra two decades of life experience since that debut to good effect. Pass Me The Conch is an impressively varied album, not taking the easy route of going nu-metal by numbers but drawing its influences from a much wider field and mixing them up to thrilling effect. And Ici Mon Decree remains un chanson magnifique.
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46. GHOST - "Impera"
Another solid album from Ghost, Impera should by all rights be absolutely ridiculous - a Satanic metal band going into new wave, power ballad and shameless cock-rock territory but somehow Ghost manage to carry it all off with some aplomb, the suave buggers. Packed with prime riffs and ridiculously catchy hooks and choruses, this shows exactly why this band have been such an enduring force over the last decade.
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As you'd expect from Kirk Brandon, Ghost Population is a hell of an ambitious album mixing funereal laments, pounding anthems to defiance and some songs where everything but the kitchen sink is thrown in (in fact, the sink's probably there somewhere if you look hard enough). There's a reason Brandon has been able to survive in this game as long as he has and that's the fact that forty years plus on from the Pack's debut single he's still got the capacity to surprise and enthrall you.
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Written and recorded during lockdown, The Anti-Album feels like a relative of Ginger Wildheart's excellent Pessimist's Companion album from a couple of years back in that it sees Tony very much staring into the abyss, looking at the darker side of his personality and ruminating over some of his past actions. Yet there's a comfort and in places the odd dash of optimism there as an undercurrent making this an oddly reassuring album for those of us who've struggled so much over the last couple of years.
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Starcrawler's first album for a major label perhaps unsurprisingly sees a couple of their rough edges smoothed out slightly but once you get used to that, this is another solid effort from this undeniably very talented band with Roadkill and Broken Angels providing the punk fury and Midnight and Better Place showing a more thoughtful slow-paced side to their output. Another quality album from a very underrated band.
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42. ED BANGER & THE NOSEBLEEDS - "Revolution X"
Quickly following up her solo Diamond Rocks album last year, Revolution X saw Edweena Banger resurrecting her punk era band to put out a genuinely good debut album. Owing more to the strident rock of her time with Slaughter & The Dogs than the primal punk of the Mk1 Nosebleeds, Revolution X wears its influences unashamedly on its sleeve but carries them off with sufficient panache to transcend them and become a great record in its own right.
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With song titles like Persian Rug Sale At The URC and Tess of the Dormobiles, this could only be Half Man Half Biscuit really. Still as irascible as ever some 35 years into their career, The Voltarol Years sees them looking at the passing of time and mortality with some surprisingly reflective songs mixed in with the trademark scathing humour on the likes of In A Suffolk Ditch. Very much a British indie institution, the world would most assuredly be a poorer place without HMHB.
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And that's it for today. Tune in tomorrow as we go headlong into the Top 40.
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