Nite Songs

  Jump for joy, it's Top 40 time - cue Whole Lotta Love / Yellow Pearl / The Wizard /your TOTP theme of choice... *** 40.    SARAH SHOOK & THE DISARMERS - "Revelations" Another band who I discovered pretty much by accident this year, Sarah (now River) Shook and their band are now on their fourth album and if, like me, this is the first you've heard of them then listening to it will make you quickly want to make up for lost time. Mixing the winsome country strum of prime time Tom Petty with a bratty indie-pop insouciance, Revelations  mixes sugar ( Criminal , Nightingale ) and spite ( Jane Doe , You Don't Get To Tell Me ) to great effect. Give this band a listen now.  *** 39.     X - "Smoke And Fiction" If this really does turn out to be LA punk veterans X's swansong then rest assured they've gone out on a high note. A more than worthy follow-up to 2020's storming comeback Alphabetland , it sees them throwing everything from old-school pun...

  Although it certainly got its share of plaudits in the press, I'll hold my hands up and say that I was a bit underwhelmed by Amyl & The Sniffers' 2019 debut album. To these ears, it sounded like the work of a band who'd been rushed into a studio to make a record before they were really ready and despite its undeniable energy, it didn't have a lot in the way of variety and quickly started to repeat itself by the time you reached its second half. Everyone deserves a second chance though and, to be fair, Comfort To Me  represents a definite step forward for Amyl & the Sniffers. The group have clearly used their experience gained over the last couple of years to start to hone their sound and slowly move away from the shouty two chord repetitiveness of their debut without shifting too much to alienate the people who came on board for that and the results, while not perfect, are certainly a bit more promising. I think the key is that the rage on here sounds a lot mo...