Nite Songs

  Interesting fact - the Wonder Stuff were the last band your correspondent saw live (at Shepherds Bush Empire just before Christmas 2019) before lockdown knocked the UK gig scene on its arse for two years. With live music shutting down through 2020 and most of 2021, Miles Hunt's livestream gigs were another thing along with Tim from the Charlatans' Listening Party sessions that helped your correspondent to just about keep his sanity during those dark times and also allowed Milo to roadtest a number of new songs. Things Can Change  therefore, is a bit of a kind of lockdown diary album from the guy featuring a mix of solo songs and a couple which were intended for a Vent 414 reunion which never quite came to pass. As with a lot of Milo's stuff, there's a nice wistful reflective feel to a lot of these songs - while I Used To Want It All  deals with being forced to spend a lot of time re-assessing your life with the onset of the pandemic, And She Gives  is a genuinely l...

  Best known as the violinist in the 21st century incarnation of the Wonder Stuff, Erica Nockalls has also carved out a decent solo career for herself in tandem with her "day job" and Dark Music From A Warm Place  is her third solo album and, as with its two predecessors, Imminent Room  and EN2 , it takes the listener on a journey down the less travelled dark alleyways of pop music. With Nockalls' violin put front and centre in these dark pop tunes, the stark drum machines and guitars actually go into almost industrial style levels of distortion on the likes of The King Of Want  while I Know  goes into almost trip-hop territory. For me though the album highlight is the stark The Dying Snow  which cuts the sound right back to brilliant effect while running it close,  Eiffel's Eye  marries a pop sensibility with a sinister lyrical undercurrent to good effect. At the other end of the scale, House of Erica  and Pearls And A Grin  see her hea...

  Well, after the Sounds From The Junkshop feature I did on them the other week, it would have seemed a bit remiss not to give the new Wonder Stuff album a listen so here you go. This is the Stuffies' fifth album since they reformed twenty (!) years ago and no less than Miles Hunt and co's ninth album overall. The intervening years since 2016's "30 Goes Around The Sun" have seen a few line-up changes with the return of long time guitarist Malc Treece and ex-Clash/Eat drummer Pete Howard (who previously played with Hunt in his mid-'90s post-grunge outfit Vent 414) along with ex-Mission (and several others) guitarist Mark Gemini Thwaite on bass. Similar to its predecessor, Better Being Lucky  is the sound of a more downbeat Wonder Stuff than those who know them solely for their '90s output will remember and I'll admit this one took me a few listens to get into but I'm happy to say that it's well worth persevering with. The brooding Feet To The Fl...

Okay so this instalment of Sounds From The Junkshop is likely to need a little bit of prior clarification. It's not that the Wonder Stuff are exactly an unknown band but they seem to be a band cursed where their two big hits, the omnipresent Size of a Cow and their Vic Reeves collaboration Dizzy seem to be the first thing people think of. For this episode of SFTJ though, we're taking a trip down a road less travelled to revisit an album that's generally regarded as the runt of the litter when it comes to the group's first run and was fairly swiftly disowned by the band at the time but ended up being one of my favourites and an album I've frequently revisited down the years. I refer of course to the band's swansong prior to splitting, Construction For The Modern Idiot . I was aware of the Wonder Stuff before then obviously - I remember the excellent Don't Let Me Down Gently  being on Top of the Pops a few years before and buying it from the local Woolworths...