Nite Songs

  Well it's only taken the buggers a decade but we officially have a new Wolfsbane album to get our teeth into. And let's be honest, in these dark times, a bit of rock 'n' roll energy topped with that trademark Howling Mad Shithead humour is something that you're never gonna hear us saying no to round here. At just half an hour for ten tracks, this is very much Wolfsbane returning to their Live Fast Die Fast  roots as the frenetic opener Spit It Out , an ode to pub punch-ups in their hometown of Tamworth, quickly makes clear. Zombies  shows a bit more of an epic side to it reminiscent of their trademark song Kathy Wilson from way back when. Impossible Love  is a satisfyingly meaty mid-tempo chug which chucks in a lyrical reference to the classic Ezy  at the end before Rock The Boat 's pounding drums hark back to songs like You Load Me Down  in the Down Fall The Good Guys era and Smalltown Kisses  has a big fist-in-the-air chorus reminiscent of Smoke An...

  “We were young, we were fast, it was never gonna last...”  - Wolfsbane  - Smoke And Red Light Unlike a few of the other early '90s Britrock bands I've covered in these pages like the Dogs D'Amour , the Quireboys and the Almighty , I wasn't particularly aware of Wolfsbane at the time of their (admittedly much more modest than the other three) commercial success. Widely hailed as "one to watch" in most of the metal mags as the '80s turned into the '90s, for some reason they never got anywhere near the Top 40 (their biggest hit, the anthemic Ezy  peaked at a lowly number 67) and despite seeing clips of their videos on the ITV Chart Show 's rock chart and hearing a really bad quality live bootleg courtesy of a mate's older brother in the early '90s (the songs were decent but it sounded like someone had chucked a dictaphone in a waste bin and left it at the back of the venue which didn't exactly inspire me to investigate further) I was ge...