Nite Songs

  Well it seems oddly apt that we're visiting the Singles Bar the day before Valentine's Day for February, doesn't it? Pull up a stool, order a drink and who knows, you might just get lucky tonight. Let's take a peek and see what joys lie within this month... Definitely the most anticipated release of this month is a new single from Rich Ragany & The Digressions   ahead of their second album due in the spring and I'm pleased to report that Marionette  (🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑) is another good offering from Rags and co with a driving verse merging into a big soaring chorus. In a just world, of course, it would be a chorus that would be being bellowed from stadium rafters by hordes of adoring fans rather than this group being a well-respected cult outfit but who knows, on this evidence, they may yet change that. Either way though, this is a fine effort and well worth your attention. Bandcamp link here . It's a generally acknowledged fact that Frank Turner  is one of rock ...

  "I don't really need, or want, to be some kind of star. I could get by on being alive but having no life..."  - The Boo Radleys , Ride The Tiger , 1996 We've seen a few bands in Sounds From The Junkshop who ended up cursed with being remembered as a one-hit wonder with a hit that sounded very little like the rest of their output but Wirral natives the Boo Radleys must surely be up their in a league of their own on this front. However, that hit ended up being the wedge that got me into them and checking out their back catalogue and realising that beyond the none-more-Britpop of the song I knew them best for was a whole weird and wonderful world of great music. Anyway, the same as a lot of people I guess, it was Wake Up Boo!  that got me into the band - in the early months of 1995 you really couldn't escape it, it was all over the radio and had set the group up, somewhat awkwardly, as leading lights of Britpop. I say awkwardly because prior to that they'd been...

  Well, with a band name like that we'd have been fools not to listen to this one. Hailing from Melbourne, Stiff Richards are another of those ultra-raw garage punk bands that seem to have emerged from the Antipodes in recent years to go alongside Amyl & The Sniffers and the Chats. Certainly hearing the rabid Point Of You  exploding from the speakers sounding like some almighty three way collision between the Dead Boys, the Parkinsons and the Saints at their rawest, the bar is set pretty high for this one. The only slight problem with State of Mind  is that it doesn't really have a lot of variety to it as the title track, Talk and Going Numb  don't really deviate from the template set out on the opener although they've got enough anger and snotty energy to just about carry 'em through. But it's only with the sinister rumbling Mr Situation  that it feels like Stiff Richards are really trying to shift things around a bit. Worth it when it happens though. Got I...

  Best known as the guitarist with Leeds psychedelic rockers the Scaramanga Six, this is Paul Morricone's second solo album and it's every bit as much of a dark and disturbing tour de force as those who are familiar with his day job band will expect. The epic opener The Sequel  deals with the unstable nature of capitalism and how you're always "only three pay cheques from a golden handshake with a twist" . It doesn't lighten up any afterwards as well - the almost trip-hop style Demon Host  is a look at the darkness at the heart of all humans and the half-spoken word Dreamfinder  and the orchestral poison waltz of If I Could Remember My Dream  and the almost disco-rock of Darkdance  (another partly spoken-word number) all look at the nature of nightmares and your subconscious. If J24M62 is a more wistful look at the mundanity of driving during rush hour and drifting off and thinking of other things then the notion of the more unpleasant parts of the subconsc...

  It's safe to say that 2020 will be remembered in music as the year of the lockdown album with several artists gaining strength from turning the fear and frustration brought on by Covid and the attendant shutdown of the world into songs and words. Against Me!'s frontwoman Laura Jane Grace is another to add to this list of people - this new album was originally conceived as an Against Me! band album but the lockdown saw the members of said group scattered to the four corners of the US and, not knowing when things would return to normal (as I write this in the middle of the second lockdown I think most of us are questioning if they ever will), decided to simply do the album as a solo project by booking out her local studios in Chicago and enlisting the help of Steve Albini to do some production remotely. The result is, as you might expect, a haunting stripped-back album which is at once comforting and stark with tunes like opener Swimming Pool Song  and the disturbingly frank M...

  So here we go with the second instalment of the SFTJ almost-weres column. For those who missed part 1, this is where I take a look at a few bands who did have a minor influence on my music taste developing but not to the extent that I felt I had enough to write a full Sounds From The Junkshop article on them. Anyway, today we're looking at 1993-95. It started with the dying embers of grunge and the rise of the short lived crusty rock movement that came along in the wake of the Levellers becoming bona fide chart stars, took in the magnesium flash of the New Wave of New Wave and ended with Britpop starting to coalesce as the big music movement of the time. For me, early '94 probably represented the first big sea change in my music taste since I'd got into guitar music 2-3 years before. The scuzzy indie-punk bands who'd comprised the majority of my listening up until this point were very much on the wane commercially by now - the Wonder Stuff would split up mid-'94 a...

  "We steal the days and catch the rays and no-one knows we're gone. We'll sail the sea, get home for tea and put the telly on..."  - Octopus , Adrenalina , 1996 So this is essentially a story all about two bands in the Britpop era who came through at the same time, one Scottish and one Welsh, who played a similar brand of psychedelic-based music which was poppy enough to see them shoehorned in with Britpop. The Welsh one went on to become darlings of the underground scene for several years and had a string of hit singles and albums. They were called the Super Furry Animals. You might have heard of them. The Scottish one put out one sadly overlooked gem of an album then seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. They were called Octopus and they're the subjects of this week's Sounds From The Junkshop. Randomly, I think my first encounter with Octopus was on a free cover CD with one of the indie music mags I read back then (I think it might have been Select?...