Nite Songs

  40.     THE SHED PROJECT - "Our Fear Is Their Power" A politically charged Stone Roses? The Charlatans after taking some songwriting lessons from Joe Strummer? I'm not entirely sure how you'd describe the Shed Project but what I would say is that they're a very unique and excellent band. Packing the hooks and melodies of the best bands of their ilk but adding a genuine socialist working class anger on the likes of  Ghost Town ,  The Crowdpleaser  and  I've Got The Blues , this is definitely a group to keep an eye on. *** 39.     THE DAMNED - "Darkadelic" After 2019's slightly underwhelming Evil Spirits , Darkadelic  felt like a big step back in the right direction for the Damned with more of a classic Strawberries  style feel to songs like The Invisible Man and Beware of the Clown  feeling like something of a return to form for these veterans. The subsequent news towards the end of the year that the band had mended fences wit...

Well, we did the intro yesterday and I guess we can't put this off any longer unfortunately. Hold yer noses, we're going in, the Nite Songs Worst 50 Albums Ever countdown officially starts here... *** 50. BAD RELIGION - "Into The Unknown" (1983) Of course, nowadays Bad Religion are rightly hailed as a seminal LA punk band (we'll ignore the fact that Brett Gurewitz's Epitaph label was responsible for inflicting the musical abortion that is Falling In Reverse on the world in recent years) but it almost didn't happen like that. Following their furious 1982 debut How Could Hell Be Any Worse? , the group decided on a radical change of direction by going prog, complete with synthesisers. I mean, fair play, they weren't the only early US punk band to try a change of sound that confused their fans (fellow early '80s hardcore types TSOL infamously first went goth/art-rock and then biker rock) but it's safe to say that jumping over to the sort of music ...

  Without wanting to sound too over-dramatic, this really is put up or shut up time for everyone's favourite Darkness soundalikes from LA via Derby. Now on their third album, their debut, 2014's  Everybody Wants  was the sound of a band where there was plenty of promise who could kick loose to good effect live but seemed a little bit hemmed in by an over-reliance on studio trickery. The route forward should have been obvious but for reasons best known to themselves (or perhaps their record label), they instead slammed firmly into reverse gear for 2018's Young And Dangerous , an album so over-produced that it saw the band's sound horribly blunted and, a couple of moments where the tunes packed the muscle to punch through the over-zealous studio sheen aside, sunk in a morass of gloopy synths and ham-fisted superfluous orchestral effects. So, have they turned it around at this belated juncture or is this a case of the group drifting beyond the point of no return? The prosp...