Nite Songs

Okay, time for the big hitters - we did the first half of our Top 100 albums yesterday and now it's ten a day from now until the New Year. Settle down and let's see how the first part of our Top 50 unfolds, shall we?... *** 50. THE KUT - "Grit" Grit  saw the Kut deliver an album more than worthy of their commercial step up in the world, ironing out their old inconsistencies to deliver a well-rounded effort packing plenty of variety and some great tunes and hooks to boot from the driving riff of Not Here For Love  to the shameless power ballad of Satellite . The sound of a band very much arriving. *** 49. CINDY LAWSON - "New Tricks" Something of a local legend in her home state of Minnesota thanks to her '80s band the Clams, New Tricks  is an album that deserves to take Cindy Lawson to a wider audience. Mixing spiky pop-punk, Runaways style gang chants and even the odd bit of grunge and shoegazing for good measure, this is an album with its fingers in man...

  It's safe to say I was a bit late to the party with Starcrawler, in fact it was only earlier this year that I first encountered their debut album after a friend recommended it to me. Suffice to say I was kicking myself for missing it first time out, it's genuinely one of the strongest opening shots I've heard for a fair few years, sounding as if someone had taken all the best bits of Queen Adreena, Silverfish, Curve, the Nymphs and the Mysterines and thrown them in a big melting pot to create something genuinely special. Well, four years on and here we are for Starcrawler album number three, their first on a major label and, maybe unsurprisingly, the sound has been refined a bit with a more mainstream pop-punk sound coming to the fore. But happily, most of the time it works pretty well and there's some good slices of feral angst on here with the hooks to keep you listening on repeat ( Roadkill , Stranded , Broken Angels , True ). If anything they sound a bit like the ...