Nite Songs

  I'll admit it - Idles are one of those bands who it took me a while to warm to. Having first discovered them via 2018's Joy As An Act Of Resistance , it felt like despite a few genuinely great moments it was a bit of a case of hype over substance - however, with last year's Ultra Mono  they delivered something genuinely great - a proper concrete punch of an album which knocked the breath clean out of you with its sheer righteous fury. Pressure on for the follow-up then. I have to say that Crawler doesn't exactly get off to a great start - opening track MTT 420 RR  is a five minute drony drudge which never kicks into gear. Fair point, it shows a different side to the band but an actual tune here would have been nice. The discordant The Wheel  at least packs the aggro back in but the atonal snarling here suggests that this is going to be much harder going than its predecessor, a point reinforced with the doomy Joy Division style When The Lights Come On although there...

  This month has seen us having a bit of a decks-clearing exercise at Nite Songs so there's quite a bit of stuff to go through - see below for the stuff we couldn't quite cram into Part 1. Part 3, consisting of EP's and mini-albums coming later this morning. *** The prospect of a new  Riskee & The Ridicule   album in 2022 is definitely an enticing one and we've got a new three tracker  Too Young To Be Blue  (🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑) from them this month. It gets off to a slow start with lead off track Young & Beautiful  sounding a bit awkward and sluggish but the Idlesesque gammon-bashing B-side Blue Jacket  is better and a new version of previous single Backwords 2 turns out to be the strongest cut here with its righteous fury. A bit hit and miss but still well worth a listen.  Bandcamp Link A four track EP consisting of four different bands? Now there's something to get every mid-'90s indie kid who remembers the early days of Fierce Panda etc feeling...

  So here we go - the inaugural Nite Songs Top 50 Albums of the Year. And what a bloody weird year it’s been... Twelve months ago I was genuinely convinced that I was done with music journalism for the foreseeable future. Pure Rawk, the webzine I wrote for at the time, had just gone into prolonged hibernation (soon to emerge though hopefully...) and I'd also just moved back to my native Bradford after a decade living in the south east. The plan was that I was going to get out and start living again, start going to gigs as a fan and enjoying them for what they were, finally get a new band of my own going seven years after the last one split up, learn to enjoy life as a music fan again really. And then Covid happened. Gigs stopped. In fact, social life as a whole pretty much stopped. Bang went the idea of starting a new band, of going to gigs, of pretty much doing anything really as I also lost my job as the company I worked for cut costs (thankfully my spell on the dole would only l...

  When the Idles put out their 2018 debut Joy As An Act Of Rebellion , they pretty much became press darlings across the board overnight. I have to be honest though, to these ears I struggled to see the the hype to be honest. In their solidarity anthem Danny Nedelko they came up with an absolute stormer of a tune and one of the best songs of the year but a lot of the rest of it fell short to these ears. So it's safe to say that going into reviewing Ultra Mono , I was very much of the opinion that it was put up or shut up time for the band and I'm pleased to say it very much goes into the former camp. Opening track War? barrels in on a truly pulverising riff as the band scream about standing up to government before Grounds takes the aggro up yet another level screaming against everything from government oppression to racist fuckwits and you know we're properly in business here. It's third track Mr Motivator that really properly nails it here though, mixing the lyrica...