Nite Songs

  “It’s always darkest before the dawn, it just never dawned on me” - Hanoi Rocks Hi all - just a quick update on the current situation with Nite Songs… Due to being a bit stressed out and having a lot of stuff on in my life at the moment, I’ve made the difficult decision to put the ‘zine on hold for a bit. Lately, I’ll be honest, keeping on top of things and making sure it’s updated regularly has started to feel like a real chore which something you essentially do as a hobby should NEVER feel like. I think the tipping point came last night when I was desperately trying to put the Sounds From The Junkshop column that was due to go up today together (it says a lot that normally I try and cue things up at least a week before they’re due to go live but as with a lot of ‘zine related stuff that’s well and truly hit the skids of late which has only added to the pressure to keep this thing up to date) and I just couldn’t think of anything to write leading to me basically being sat gawpi...

  I was pleased to discover last year that Hi-Fi Sean (aka former High Fidelity and Soup Dragons frontman Sean Dickson) and David McAlmont have been collaborating on an album - given the pedigree of the guys involved (McAlmont's peerless voice and Dickson's record for supremely tuneful experimentation with the very underrated High Fidelity), it seemed as if this really had the potential to be something special. The seven minute opening title track eases you gently into the album - a dreamy slice of string-drenched soul with McAlmont's voice soaring over the top. Fever  is similarly chilled with its rolling rhythm while recent single Beautiful  sees McAlmost really cutting loose over some almost trip-hop drums and Bollywood strings (those with long memories may remember Dickson collaborating with the Bollywood orchestra on the High Fidelity's classic Demonstration  album a couple of decades ago) before Hurricanes  takes the tempo up a notch with some funky rhythm...

  Hailing from South Wales, Sister Morphine are another group, similar to the Last Great Dreamers or Paradise Alley, were regulars on the live circuit in the early '90s just after the glam-punk ship sailed with the arrival of grunge. However, the pandemic saw the band re-establish contact with each other and decide to give things another go and Ghosts Of Heartbreak City , their much delayed debut album, is the result. My initial thoughts when I reviewed the album's lead-off single Nothin' Dirty In The Truth  a few days before writing this 'ere album review was that Sister Morphine sounded a lot like the Backyard Babies but that's actually a bit of a red herring - over the 15 tracks here, they show an impressive amount of variety and twists and turns to keep you interested. Second track Do You Wanna Get Wasted?  is a case in point with its chugging Dr Feelgood style riff (that's the pub rock legends not the Crue song for the record) being underpinned by an acoust...

  "I can't recall 'cos I've had quite a few/So lend me your ears and I'll tell ya a tale..."  - The Sea Hags  - Doghouse The Sea Hags hailed from San Francisco and were friends of fellow GDR alumni the Nymphs and if you remember that column, you've probably already got an uneasy feeling about how this story's likely to end. And I suspect that you're probably right but suffice to say the answer is "not well". Anyway, the group were formed in San Francisco in the mid-'80s by frontman Ron Yocom and bassist Chris Schlosshardt. They seemed to quickly gain a reputation as a band who were scuzzy enough to attempt to appeal to the sleaze rock crowd but also heavy enough to capture a few floating thrash fans as well - indeed, their first demos were produced by none other than Kirk Hammett and they shared bills with the likes of the Ramones , Motorhead and fellow San Fran natives the Dead Kennedys in their early days. It was enough to bring th...

  Heard ya missed us, well we're back. We didn't run a Singles Bar in January due to a lack of stuff to review (kind of standard for that time of year tbh) but I'm pleased to report that we've now got enough stuff to open the bar up again so let's open the fridge and get stuck in... *** Always good to have something exciting to start off the Singles Bar for a new year and the prospect of a new offering from  the Damned  definitely falls into that category. The Invisible Man  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑) is culled from Vanian, Sensible and co's new offering Darkadelic  and is a promising effort which just when you've got it pegged as a mid-tempo garage rocker suddenly goes into a full-on psychedelic freakout just to really throw you off. Looking forward to that new album chaps. *** I'm thoroughly ashamed to admit that I completely missed the memo about  Black Star Riders  having a new album out but rest assured we'll get a review up of it in the near future. In the m...

  "There ain't nothin' on TV but a preacher tryin' to save me/I'll just close my eyes and make it go away..."  - The Hangmen - Rotten Sunday The Hangmen are one of those rare groups who could have featured in either the Sounds From The Junkshop or Garbage Days Revisited columns as their career kind of straddles both. The group would first rise up in the Sunset Strip era when they were briefly being hyped as the Next Big Thing only for things to fall apart and the group to be knocked on their backs for over a decade before pulling themselves out of the gutter to start things again in the early noughties. (Quick NB - this is the American Hangmen we're talking about, not the UK psychobilly band. Just so we're all on the same page right from the off, like) The group formed in L.A. in 1986 under the guidance of Montana native Bryan Small and, similar to the Joneses a couple of years earlier, gained notoriety as a killer live band in the L.A. circuit who we...

Ginger Wildheart has always been a man to hit you with new material when you're least expecting it and to be honest, following on from the worthy but rather sedate Sinners album from last year, the prospect of something showing off the harder edge to his output was definitely something that piqued our interest. Teeth is very much a back to basics punk effort, crashing through 16 tracks in just 26 minutes and seeing the G-man at arguably his heaviest since the brutal Mutation albums of a few years ago. Right from the opening political tirade of Not My Country (very much an anthem for these times where the choice between Sunak and Starmer increasingly has the feel of two eunuchs fighting over a punctured condom), the guy definitely means business here and this album is pretty much one concrete-heavy right hook after another as he skewers religious bigots ( Digital Elimination , Thoughts And Prayers ), online mob mentality ( Witch Hunt ), braindead tabloid readers ( Happy John ) and...

  Well I think we can certainly agree on one thing - these L.A. scuzzballs have definitely picked one of the coolest band names we've seen at Nite Songs for a while. The Neverland Ranch Davidians have been picking up a fair bit of good press across the board with this album so we thought that we'd stick our heads in to see what the fuss is all about. I have to be honest, the first impressions weren't exactly promising - opening track The Gospel  is a drony four minute instrumental which seems to basically consist of a three note Kyuss riff being recycled over and again and could really have been done at being kept to just a minute or two. However, the scuzzy Danko Jones rock 'n' roll of Rat Patrol  kicks this one into gear properly with its fuzzed up guitar sound and hyperactive vocals getting this one going properly. Fat Back  conjures up the weird image of James Brown jamming with Mudhoney with its funky rhythms and grungy guitar sound - an odd mix but it definite...

  "Gonna dim the lights, gonna draw the blinds, gonna blow that fuse, it could be mine..."  - Crazyhead  - What Gives You The Idea That You're So Amazing, Baby? Here's the thing right - if Desert Orchid  had come out in about 1992-93 then I guarantee you, I'd have been all over it. Unfortunately though, it came out that crucial two years before I'd started properly getitng into guitar music and hence this band very much passed me by. Crazyhead were an early doors grebo band from Leicester who sprung up around the same time as the original progenitors of the movement - the Wonder Stuff (obviously), Pop Will Eat Itself (once they'd got out of their awkward C86 jangly stage), Gaye Bykers on Acid (who sadly I was never that big a fan of - sorry guys), Diesel Park West (the indie face of the movement) and of course the Tattooed Beat Messiah himself, Zodiac Mindwarp . Sound-wise, they were a bit of an odd one - almost like an exact halfway house between the gl...

  "When I am high, my axe is acid!"  - Electric Eel Shock  - Scream For Me It's often been said that the Japanese do rock 'n' roll slightly different to us Brits. Cultural barriers, call it what you will but it's safe to say that the vast majority of Japanese rock bands I've encountered down the years have often mixed brilliance and oddness. Cases in point - Guitar Wolf (Link Wray obsessed leather clad garage punks who covered Rumble  in a different style on every single one of their albums), EZO (Gene Simmons managed facepaint clad hair metallers whose albums inevitably sounded like '80s Kiss but much heavier)*, Shonen Knife (Kurt Cobain approved all-girl Ramonesy pop-punks with a hard edge) and Mika Bomb (same thing except ten years later and minus the Kurt endorsement). I mean, granted, not everything in this genre works (as anyone who remembers Babymetal's truly dreadful nails-on-chalkboard attempt at thrash will tell you) but sometimes you en...

  Hailing from Immingham near Grimsby (hence their name), the Ming City Rockers briefly looked like quite hot property a few years ago with their debut self-titled album being a prime slice of howled smalltown angst which picked them up enough plaudits to get Steve Albini in to produce the follow-up, 2016's  Lemon . And then...nothing. Seven years on from that sophomore effort and the group have returned, slimmed down to a three-piece and with a very noticeable change to their image. But the sound is very much the same with the sort of angry three-chord garage punk that made their debut such a good effort. The change seems to be that Lime  sees the Ming City Rockers taking their worldview out of the smalltowns and over to the nation as a whole. The sarky lead off single Jill Was An Anarchist  was a definite marker laid down and there's plenty more on Lime  where that came from such as the snarling Poor Old Jim  taking a swipe at alcoholic F*r*ge-supporting ...

  An album that’s definitely piqued our interest just through those involved in it, it’s fair to say that the Wingmen have quite the supergroup pedigree. Formed around the nucleus of the Sensible Gray Cells' rhythm section of Paul Gray (also of the Damned, Eddie & the Hot Rods and UFO) on bass and Marty Love (also of Johnny Moped) on drums, also along for the ride are Stranglers frontman Baz Warne, Ruts DC guitarist Leigh Heggarty and Supergrass keyboard player Rob Coombes. You can definitely hear elements of all of the group's parent bands in here but the key is that the Wingmen put enough of their own DNA in there to ensure that you'd never mistake this as an album of off-cuts. Second song The Last Cigarette  (which follows the garage rock style opening instrumental  Starting Blocks ) is a case in point with elements of the Damned circa The Black Album  or Strawberries and Supergrass in their more wistful moments (think Going Out  or similar), a classic sw...

  "The running's over, time to pray..."  - The Outcasts  - Nowhere Left To Run Part of the Belfast '78 class of punk rock that also spawned Stiff Little Fingers , the Undertones, Rudi and several others, the Outcasts were late developers who, after an inconsistent start, matured into a brutally vicious punk band once they hit their stride. The group were originally signed to the infamous Good Vibrations label run by Terry Hooley (along with the likes of Rudi, Protex, Victim, the Moondogs and several others who never quite managed to break through to the big time) when they were still in school, the group would put out a series of singles and an album, Self-Conscious Over You  which was a solid effort but did sound a bit like the work of a youth club band who'd just been given a record deal. They were clearly aiming for the SLF style wall of sound but ultimately came across as a much weedier Undertones. After this, they would take a lengthy break and reassess thing...

  "Well I know that you think you're a star/But a pill-poppin' jukebox is all that you are"  - Jet  - Rollover DJ Ah, poor old Jet*. There's an old saying along the lines of not building yourself up too much because it just ends with you having further to fall and of all the early noughties garage rock revival bands, you can't help but think of this lot when you say it. For about five minutes, these Aussies hitched a lift on the back of the garage rock revival bandwagon and seemed to be literally everyone's favourite band. Unfortunately once the scene crashed and burned, the ground fell away from beneath their feet incredibly rapidly and they went from critical darlings to a running joke with their name being used for a byword for sub-par bands of this genre. But I'm getting ahead of myself here, let's start at the beginning, shall we?... * - Just to establish from the off that it's the Australian Jet we're talking about here, not the Briti...

  Another group from the Rum Bar records stable, the Shang Hi-Lo's hail from Boston (obviously) and this album definitely has a bit of a retro feel to it as you would expect, dipping its toe into both garage rock and classic '60s pop. But that's not a problem. Kicking in with the swinging Takes One To Know One  which takes the old rockabilly template and adds a dose of candy floss sweet melodies to it, second track Monsieur Valentine  could almost a great lost Revillos song (maybe with a hint of Kirsty MacColl in there as well) with its girl group style vocal harmonies and retro power pop rhythms. The title track goes into almost '70s disco territory which is...well, okay but it doesn't quite sit as comfortably as the first two tracks did but thankfully the Ronettes-meets-Ramones Plymouth Rock  is on hand to right things afterwards - again, the duelling male and female vocals definitely hark back to Eugene Reynolds and Fay Fife a bit. Billy  has an almost spaghe...