Nite Songs

  "Here's to fallin' off the world’s dark side/Driftin' in alone on the morning tide/Riding on an all night train through the crystal caves/Where the moonlight shines the path for a better day"  - Soul Asylum  - Crashing Down Mention Soul Asylum to most British music fans who aren't "in the know" and their response will probably be to roll their eyes and remember that terrible mushy acoustic ballad  Runaway Train  song which gave the band a Top 10 hit over here in 1992 and which instantly condemned them to be written off as limp third division corporate Cobain wannabes. Of course though, that's far from the full story - if EVER there was a band whose hit sounded nothing like the majority of their catalogue prior to that point then it was Dave Pirner and co. Obviously if you remember the early instalments of Sounds From The Junkshop when I was reminiscing about the early '90s, you'll remember that I had precious little time for grunge - to...

  Poor old Soul Asylum. Back when I was a teenager, they were very much the whipping boys of the grunge movement and generally sneered at as everything that was wrong with the sort of bands who'd seen Nirvana clean up with Nevermind  and thought "hey, we could do that!" before hitting paydirt with a watered down version of the formula that could be easily sold on to the mallrats of middle America. The fact that they had a pretty boy singer who was stepping out with Winona Ryder at the time I suspect probably didn't help their cause among our little group of ne'er-do-wells either. Of course, it was only 15-20 years after the snorefest that was Runaway Train  that I found out (from Ginger Wildheart of all people) that this was by no means the whole story and that in the '80s the group had put out three brilliant albums ( Made To Be Broken , While You Were Out  and the near-flawless Hang Time ) which saw them looking more like chief pretenders to the Replacements...