Nite Songs

There was a time around the mid-noughties when St Albans natives the Subways were genuinely considered to be the bright hopes for the UK alternative music scene. Similar to early Ash, they were a pop-punk with a kick behind them even if their album unfortunately didn't quite live up to the hype it had been saddled with and saw them slide back into obscurity. You can't keep a good band of indie-rockers down evidently though and so 2023 sees the Subways back with a new album. The surprise is that it's not bad either - it seems that the group have put their near two decades of experience to good use to come up with a record that has a foot in both the indie and punk camps and comes up with something surprisingly good right from the moment the low slung menace of opener and former single  You Kill My Cool  kicks things into gear. Love Waiting On You  and the title track both have an almost new wave feel with their glacial keyboards and the chiming vocal interplay between Bill...

  "There ain't no future, there ain't no past, there's just a graveyard and it's comin' up fast..."  - The Dead Boys  - Third Generation Nation Well, here we go, Garbage Days Revisited number 100. While I had a few options I was considering for this, I decided to go with one of my favourite groups that still haven't featured in this column to date - ladies and gentlemen, CBGBs' other unjustly forgotten sons (along with the Dictators who we covered on here many moons ago) - the Dead Boys... We've already encountered Stiv Bators in Garbage Days Revisited's past of course, be that with the awesome Lords of the New Church or his brief stint with the Wanderers but this was where he started out. The Dead Boys were formed in Cleveland in the mid-'70s from the ashes of proto-punks Rocket From The Tombs (the other half of whom, bizarrely, went on to art school post-punk types Pere Ubu - talk about two very different bands!). I said it before ...

  "We got sex and drugs and friends at the bar..."  - The Glitterati  - Back In Power The time was somewhere around 2005. The place was a gig at Leeds Cockpit. Myself and the bassist from my then-band Brookside Riot Squad (just to say hanging on at this time before we decided to turn off our life support the following year) were at a gig by hometown lads the Glitterati handing out some flyers for an upcoming gig of ours at the Vine. At this point the Glitterati were in a bit of a weird position as they were being lauded by both the NME and Kerrang! and by being able to dip a toe in both pools it had actually taken them to proper Top 40 success. Anyway, Brookside Riot Squad's slogan which we put on all of our flyers was "No emo. No trendies. No bullshit. Just proper fuckin' punk rock."* Our wander around the bar saw us handing the flyers to a couple of Julian Casablancas wannabes hanging around at the edge of the venue and one of them simply fixed me with a s...

  The prospect of a new Simple Minds album in 2022 is definitely one that makes you wonder exactly what you're going to get. The group are probably most remembered during their '80s heyday for slowly drifting away from their Roxy Music influenced art school roots towards being full on stadium rock superstars alongside U2 et al which eventually saw them pretty much pilloried right out of the big time for their perceived pretentiousness and lack of self-awareness. However, they seem to have undergone something of a critical re-evaluation of late and I actually feel it's deserved - for all their faults, even at their most bombastic, Simple Minds were still capable of penning a good tune ( Real Life , See The Lights ) and the fact that they can still pack out arenas nowadays is proof that their appeal's definitely endured. And let's be honest, even at their worst, they never came across as being anywhere near as insufferable as Bono et al. Direction Of The Heart  is bas...

  It might just be me but I could've sworn that Iggy's previous album, 2016's Post Pop Depression , was meant to be his last. Ah well, can't keep a good chaos engine down I guess and you're certainly not gonna find me complaining about a new album from the lord of misrule in my inbox. Especially when they kick in with a slice of prime Iggy foul-mouthed aggression like Frenzy . Ig might well be in his seventies now but on this evidence, he's still got an aggression that'd be impressive in a frontman half his age. But if you think this is gonna be Iggy going into heritage mode then Strung Out Johnny  quickly puts paid to that with an almost Sisters of Mercy style goth vibe to it before a big soaring chorus. With a backing band (Duff McKagan on bass, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Chad Smith on bass and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Watt) locked in and tight, this is Iggy proving that even after five decades in the game he's got the capacity to surprise. New...

  "Fifty five million and that's just the start of it..."  - Thee Hypnotics  - Justice In Freedom You could probably tell everything you need to know about Thee Hypnotics just by looking at the sleeve of this album. Four mean-looking longhairs who look like they just teleported in from the scummiest Detroit garage you could imagine circa 1969 or so ready to kick loose and fry your brain with some synapse-exploding primal rock 'n' roll. Even more impressive when you consider they were actually from that perennial punchline for jokes about boring home counties towns, High Wycombe... Thee Hypnotics were a classic "right place, wrong time" band - plenty of critical acclaim but they burst on to the scene with their brand of Stooges indebted garage-punk/psychedelic freakouts right in the middle of Madchester and were well and truly swimming against the tide from day one. I s'pose you could make an argument that Primal Scream took a not entirely dissimilar ...

  "There's fear in your valley/Get on your skateboard and split"  - Amen  - California's Bleeding It seems weird to think it now but there was a brief time in the early noughties when Amen genuinely did seem like one of the most vital US rock bands around. Rising up during the nu-metal era, they managed to not only get good press in the usual places of Kerrang! but even the NME were briefly featuring them regularly - I remember in one review, they were describing Amen's frontman Casey Chaos as the new Jello Biafra, high praise indeed. Me? Well, I hate to admit it but Amen were one of those bands who by rights I should've liked but I never quite got my head around. And it wasn't for lack of trying - I had all three of their albums in my CD collection at some point and I saw them live on a few occasions (they toured with the Wildhearts quite a bit as the two bands were good friends which will become relevant in a few paragraphs' time). Their sound was t...

  Sometimes you can tell exactly what you're getting from an album by the cover art and, if you've seen the picture above, you can probably already guess what Aussie rockers The Stripp sound like - fast, furious and filthy rock 'n' roll which kicks in on the Plasmatics style title track with all the subtlety of a hurricane ripping the roof off your house. The influences are pretty much what you'd expect here - a bit of Motorhead, a touch of Vice Squad, a hint of the Supersuckers but, as with all the best bands of this genre, the key is that the Stripp have the sheer bloody-minded enthusiasm to keep this barrelling through while steadfastly refusing to let your attention go. The fact that they've got a good ear for a decent hook and riff doesn't hurt either. The only slight complaint is that the production's a tiny bit off on one or two tracks with the vocals fighting to be heard above the guitars but it's nowt a bit of extra care in the studio next t...

  Hailing from South London, the Fades are gaining a reputation of one of the premier garage rock bands in the capital these days and, as with a few albums we've reviewed in these webpages of late, Night Terrors  was written during the lockdown as it was a recurring feature of life for the band's frontman Dave during the lockdown. As befits its title and subject matter, Night Terrors  is an off-kilter effort which might take a few listens to get into but rewards those who persevere with it. Certainly, the discordant vocals and guitars often give the impression of the whole operation being on the verge of collapse on the likes of The Pessimist  and Known It All Along  while Lost My Job  goes into XTC/Nightingales style post-punk territory. However, the likes of People In General  show that they can rein the weirdness in and build up an intriguing multi-part epic which starts off as tuneful new wave before drifting into a nightmarish state-of-the-nation ...

"Give it a kick and I drive it away/Ride through the night and I sleep in the day"  - The Revillos  - Motorbike Beat As is probably obvious from the name, the Revillos were basically the Rezillos under a different name. For those unaware, the Rezillos were one of the best of the early pop-punk bands and one of the first Scottish punk bands to break through. But they very much weren't simple three-chord merchants, trading in bouncy rhythms, futuristic sci-fi imagery and were a big dollop of technicolour '50s style dreaming in the middle of the "less is more" image that a lot of the bands of that era employed. Their sole album, Can't Stand The Rezillos  is rightly regarded as a '77 punk classic and I really recommend tracking it down if you're somehow unaware of it.  When the Rezillos fell apart in late 1978 with the departure of guitarist and chief songwriter Jo Callis (who would eventually end up in the Human League), the remaining members of the...

  "Now they're all watching me/Who did I used to be?..."  - Crystal Pistol  - Rockstar Ohhhh boy. Crystal bloody Pistol. Now HERE'S a cautionary tale about misrepresenting yourself for the unwary if ever there was one... Crystal Pistol were another one of those groups who kind of ended up surfing that post-Darkness/ The Dirt wave that led to the sleaze rock revival of the early to mid-noughties. Hailing from Canada, they were a Backyard Babies influenced mob of scuzzy glam-punks who were clearly intending on following the likes of Robin Black and Crash Kelly to sort-of-infamy. And yeah, I'll admit it, the group's self-titled debut (and as it turned out only) album wasn't bad at all - a full throttle angry snarl of a record that tapped into that whole "piss broke, pissed up and pissed off" vein of anger that had informed the Backyards' Total 13 with songs like Locomotive , Watch You Bleed and Teenage Parasite being angry howls of rage a...

  Although they bill themselves as From The Jam live, on record Bruce Foxton and Russell Hastings use this moniker, presumably to keep Paul Weller's lawyers from the door. Foxton's done a couple of decent solo albums in recent years in the form of 2012's Back In The Room  and 2016's Smash The Clock  so I was intrigued to see what this one would sound like. The answer is that it's a perfectly pleasant album but doesn't really leap out at you right from the moment the chugging blues rock of Electronic Lover  starts the album. Feet Off The Ground , ironically enough, sounds like the Style Council with its chiming keyboards and almost jazzy rhythms while Lula  is straight ahead AOR (complete with a sax solo). And so it pretty much continues throughout to be honest. Like I say, I'm aware that Foxton is in his sixties now and it's probably a bit unfair to expect him to still be the angry young firebrand he was in his Jam days but The Butterfly Effect , while i...

  Bluddyell, now here's a name I didn't think I'd be seeing in the reviews column in 2023. Thousand Yard Stare were one of those bands who were briefly tipped to be the next big thing in the post-Madchester pre-Britpop indie ice age of 1992-93 but notched up just a sole Top 40 hit, 1992's Comeuppance  (kind of a midway point between baggy and shoegazing) before disappearing as fast as they'd arrived as both of those movements descended into being terminally unfashionable. The group reformed in 2015 and have been beavering away on the fringes of the indie scene since with Earthanasia  being their second album (third if you include a live one) since reforming. And...well, to be honest, it sounds much the same as Thousand Yard Stare always did. The guitars on the likes of Measures ,  Espirit du Corps  and the languid piano ballad  Borrowed Time  still wash over you like warm ocean waves while the songs lilt along gently without any real sense of haste. Th...

  "I wanna see the sights at the end of the world and spend my nights with beautiful girls..."  - The London Cowboys  - Let's Get Crazy A month or two back when we covered the '80s sleaze rock band London in the Spiders & Snakes SFTJ , I mentioned that they were best known as being a band who nearly every up and coming Sunset Strip rocker went through on their way to bigger things. Believe you me, there's a good argument for the not-entirely-dissimilarly-named London Cowboys being the British equivalent. Along with the not entirely dissimilar Little Roosters , they were the band who tried to take the whole glammed-up cockiness of the New York Dolls on into the '80s. Unfortunately despite even managing to get the official Dolls seal of approval by having a couple of that band's former members in and out of the group during their existence, they still ended up languishing in obscurity for the majority of their existence. The group was formed out of an e...

  "Due to lack of interest, tomorrow is cancelled..."  - The Kaiser Chiefs  - Ruby So let's go right back here. Specifically to a gig my old band Brookside Riot Squad were playing at a short-lived Leeds venue called the Platform in the basement of the Corn Exchange some time around...I reckon 2003 probably? It was an afternoon bill with about six bands on it and we were the first one on. Headlining the evening was a group called Parva who'd just been dropped by their label Mantra (who'd also had China Drum and Compulsion on their books in earlier years) after releasing an album that hadn't sold the previous year. After our set had finished and we'd packed up our gear, I'd headed to the bar for a much needed post-gig pint while the second band of the evening were playing and I remember striking up a brief conversation with the bloke next to me who, as I'd find out later in the evening when he was onstage, was the headline band's lead singer. H...