Nite Songs

  As you'll know if you read this thing yesterday, we were waxing lyrical about Brian's classic The Knife Feels Like Justice  in last week's Garbage Days Revisited and about how it helped your correspondent through a particularly tough time in his life. However, recent years have seen Brian very much working out what works best for him and sticking to it. Not that the results have necessary been particularly bad - certainly 2018's Stray Cats album 40  was a much better effort than it had any right to be - but when you're running on a set formula, you need to deliver the goods to avoid slipping into predictability. I'm happy to say though that Gotta Have The Rumble  definitely delivers those goods. There's a real straight up energy to it that's impressive given that Setzer is now in his fifth decade of making music from the trademark Setzer strut of opener Checkered Flag  to the skittering Cramps-esque Smash Up On Highway One . The quality standard remain...

  "Boyhood dreams are burnin' to the ground, long dark shadows hang over this town"  - Brian Setzer  - Chains Around Your Heart Oh boy does this album seem to divide people. I think I first discovered Brian Setzer via the Stray Cats when I was taking  my first tentative steps into listening to punk in my early twenties - for some reason the Cats always seemed to crop up on a few of the punk/new wave compilations I was listening to at the time which isn't as far fetched as it sounds. Lest we forget, this was the era of Sid Vicious covering Something Else  and C'mon Everybody  so the Cats' souped up take on rockabilly wasn't that far out of step with the times. Hand on heart though, I've always kind of regarded the Stray Cats as a band I can take or leave. Their albums were decent enough but apart from the timeless  Rock This Town , they never quite had that "haul you back in for repeated listening" thing that the best of the bands from that er...