Nite Songs

  We're well into the top half of our albums of the year list now *** 30. THE DIVINE COMEDY - "Rainy Sunday Afternoon" Neil Hannon's first album in six years and it sees him in a more reflective mood in keeping with the times. Yet even in his more downbeat moments, the guy's skill as a songwriter can't help but shine through from the political anger of Mar-a-Lago By The Sea  to the poignant The Last Time I Saw The Old Man  and Invisible Thread . The sound of a master of his craft at work. *** 29. DU BLONDE - "Sniff More Gritty" Honestly, I'd completely missed Du Blonde prior to this year but having been introduced to their work via Sniff More Gritty , I'm definitely going to check some of the back catalogue out. Mixing icy electro with a snotty punk anger, the likes of Dollar Coffee  and Solitary Individual  are angry diatribes on the superficiality of 21st century life. A confident blast of an album which is well worth a listen. *** 28. COME...

  Liverpool natives Pete Bentham & The Dinner Ladies are one of those bands who I seem to have encountered a lot of times down the years, usually as a support band at a punk gig somewhere but amazingly, this is the first time I've found myself actually listening to one of their albums. They've always been an entertaining band when I've seen them in the live arena so I was interested to see how this one would pan out. Lurking somewhere in the middle ground between the Buzzcocks' tuneful pop-punk angst and the Television Personalities' endearingly shambolic early stuff, What's On The Inside Has To Come Out  is a fun 35 minutes of no-nonsense DIY pop-punk which brings back memories of everyone from the Ramones to X-Ray Spex (via the Lora Logic style sax on a lot of the tracks). Similar to a male version of Helen Love, Bentham is a guy with a good ear for lyrics which capture the ordinary (as the Jona Lewie-referencing I'm Shy  shows) and the likes of Money ...