Album Review: Foxton & Hastings - "The Butterfly Effect"

 

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 inoffensive enough, is so laid back that you could bottle it up and sell it as valium. If you're not after something particularly challenging to listen to then this will probably suit you just fine but I just kind of wish it wasn't playing it quite so safe to be honest - it feels like the musical equivalent of a rainy Sunday afternoon when you're stuck in the house and gently dozing on the sofa trying to forget that Monday morning's just around the corner. If the idea of an ‘80s MOR rock revival has you salivating with excitement then you may find something of solace here but otherwise approach with caution I’m afraid.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌓🌓🌓🌓🌓🌓🌑🌑🌑🌑 (6/10)

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