Nite Songs

  18 months may be a commendably quick turnaround time between albums but in the fickle world of the music business it can seem like an eternity if you're unlucky with your timings. When TV Priest unleashed their debut album Uppers  in February last year, they were clearly aligning themselves with the uncompromising political post-punk scene that Idles and Fontaines DC had taken overground in the previous 12 months and it seemed like a smart move even if they weren't quite on the same level as the former's Ultra Mono  or the latter's A Hero's Death . A bit of fine tuning and the theory would seem to have been that they'd be well placed to surf the wave with the follow-up. Unfortunately the time period since has seen both Idles and Fontaines deliver underwhelming follow up albums with the former's Crawler  and the latter's Skinty Fia  being pale copies of what had come before, jettisoning the hooks and intrigue for blaring irritating atonalism and tuneles...

  TV Priest seem to be gaining a reputation as ones to watch among the alternative music press - having released two highly acclaimed singles last year, they've recently signed to Sub Pop records and thus we now have their debut album. Similar to Idles or Girls In Synthesis, Uppers  is most definitely not an easy listen - opener The Big Curve  kicks in with a dischordant riff and some Mark E Smith indebted vocals and Press Gang follows a similar path with the lyrics veering from angry polemic to obtuse metaphor seemingly straight after each other. It continues much the same with the content varying from good stuff (the anti-Covid Journal Of A Plague Year and Slideshow 's skewering of idiotic keyboard warriors) to songs which frustratingly miss the mark like the sluggish Leg Room and the dull Fathers And Sons . The main issue I have with Uppers  is that, like it or not, there's an elephant in the room here and its name is  Ultra Mono . And, while I suspect that T...