The Hold Steady – Stay Positive

Here we have a new album of anthemic rock from American riff-meisters, The Hold Steady, which is more than pleasant and a change in direction from the previous efforts. I’ll get the comparisons out of the way immediately, it’s like Bob Mould fronting the E Street Band, songwriting akin to Springsteen, and the strangest ones I’ve picked up are the commercial sing-along pop and dual vocals of Rancid, and a certain feeling of 90s alternative rock a bit like Soul Asylum’s Grave Dancers Union. It’s no real surprise that you’ll find comparisons with Husker Du and Soul Asylum when you look at The Hold Steady’s Minneapolis connections, you could even compare the Purple Rain-esque guitar solo in Joke About Jamaica to Minneapolis’ most famous son, Prince.

The album only has two weak songs for me, those being One For The Cutters and Navy Sheets, everything else is great. Overblown pantomime piano and gruff enunciation are at the forefront as always, with social commentary on opening track, Constructive Summer and religious imagery with Both Crosses, whilst the album’s title track is raw out-and-out power-punk. As well as the usual influences scattered around, one of my favourite bits is the Elvis Costello style organ that crops up here and there.

This is an album full of potential summer hymns and anthems to harmonise along to in festivals all over the country. There are enough hooks and big choruses to get you jumping around and if you can’t remember the lyrics, there’s plenty of “woah-oh-ohs” for you to chant as well.

4/5


NARC. is currently available in all good record shops, pubs, practice rooms etc. etc. View more information on NARC. magazine, including outlets, at their MySpace, and at their website.

Fight Like Apes – Lend Me Your Face

Lend Me Your Face is the first UK single from the new Fight Like Apes album. What struck me immediately about this one minute and fifty three seconds ditty is that the song title, Lend Me Your Face, is repeated twenty five times. That wouldn’t usually bother me, but when it gets to the point that it feels as if somebody is standing trying to drill a giant hole into the side of my head whilst shouting “Lend Me Your Face! Lend Me Your Face! Lend Me Your Face!”, then it does start to get irritating. I’m sitting writing this with an appalling hangover, which may account for the irritability factor here, but in all seriousness I could be in the most tranquil, placid and healthy of spirits and this, “Lend Me Your Face! Lend Me Your Face! Lend Me Your Face!” over and over again would still drive me to a horrifically heinous crime. I can imagine the phrase taking over my life, and when I’m standing accused in the dock I’m sure I’ll be able to get an insanity plea as I stand in my paper suit screaming, “Lend Me Your Face! Lend Me Your Face! Lend Me Your Face!”, over and over again at the judge and jury.

This is basically shouty obnoxious pop, in the vein of a sleazier unpolished Ting Tings. With synth overload and aggressive drumming, the Dublin band do have the basis of a good tune, but that is completely negated by the overwhelming urge to kill myself which is brought on by the monotony of “Lend Me Your Face! Lend Me Your Face! Lend Me Your Face!”. The sneering, vicious feminist lyrics aren’t my bag and probably have more in common with Valerie Singleton than Valerie Solanas. All in all a decent tune ruined by pointless repetition and annoying un-catchy vocals.


NARC. is currently available in all good record shops, pubs, practice rooms etc. etc. View more information on NARC. magazine, including outlets, at their MySpace, and at their website.

White Denim – All You Really Have To Do

White Denim are the type of band that should have been strutting around the stage of Woodstock in 1969. Amongst the showers of bands these days that try to purvey their own brand of revivalist psychedelia and get full of acid, White Denim go straight for the throat with a harder approach to the tired old format of the American singer drawling through their fucked out of their head lyrics with a faint British accent. All You Really Have To Do parades around with a vocal halfway between Robert Plant and Jimi Hendrix, with a dirty filthy garage guitar and a sexual bass line. The song is a vicious attack of pop goodness, with the sound no doubt being influenced by the heavier of the blues and prog bands from the 60’s, think Jagger or Plant in their prime fronting Blue Cheer, or Hendrix playing with Captain Beefheart. In the space of two and a bit minutes, this song will tear your heart out and bash it around the town with the back of a guitar. A fantastic single, bursting with aggression, and dying to take you on a dark drug induced journey where burning tie-dye T-shirts covered in blood light the way.


NARC. is currently available in all good record shops, pubs, practice rooms etc. etc. View more information on NARC. magazine, including outlets, at their MySpace, and at their website.

Edwyn Collins – Home Again

This single, the title track from last year’s well received album, almost may never have made it out as a single – and that would’ve been a massive crime. When I think of Edwyn Collins and his near death experience, I can’t help feeling all sentimental for him and it gives you a little sense of perspective whereby you realise you should really be treasuring such people, rather than just being passé about somebody who wrote the soundtrack to many of your parties, break ups and break downs.

In the same vein as Richard Hawley, Mr Collins shows what an amazing wealth of singer songwriter talent we have in this country. Who needs all of the fashion bands in loud luminous leggings and Flock of Seagulls haircuts, when you’ve got songwriters like this producing some of the most sincere and heartfelt songs this side of the 60’s.

The single tells the tale of discovering and rediscovering the music of his youth and reflecting on where he grew up, something which will resonate with anyone who ever hears a song from their childhood and gets transported all the way back to feeling like a kid all over again. When you think about what he’s been through over the past few years, the song seems even more poignant and heart-rending, and even if he’s not looking for your sympathy, it's impossible to listen to this single without a sense of compassion and relief that one of the greatest British songwriters of the past 30 years is still with us.

Home Again will make you swoon, maybe cry, and maybe even make you want to get in touch with some of the people you take for granted or that you’ve never heard from in ages, fantastic stuff.


NARC. is currently available in all good record shops, pubs, practice rooms etc. etc. View more information on NARC. magazine, including outlets, at their MySpace, and at their website.

Electricity In Our Homes – We Thought It Was But It Wasn’t

This is about as chaotic and disjointed as anything else that is out there at the moment. Just over a minute and a half of dirty, filthy art-rock. In the space of that just over a minute and a half, you’ll be subjected to the sneering and vocal aggression of an amalgamation of Johnny Rotten and Mark E. Smith, a frenzied assault of anarchic guitar lines like Zappa fronting Melt Banana, and a rhythm section that could’ve been taken from one of Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ lost singles, with the machine gun drums and humpy thumpy bass determined to march down your street, kick your door in and drag you dancing down your path in an impulsive paroxysm of glee.

The band have a distinctively 80s sound about them, which is no bad thing. I‘d much rather be sitting like a kid in my Lord Anthony anorak with a bag of glue listening to this band of rag-tag rogues in some graffiti covered squat, than face the reality of getting older and older.

Go and lose yourself in this single and hear a band expressing all of their insecurities and not giving a shit about it.


NARC. is currently available in all good record shops, pubs, practice rooms etc. etc. View more information on NARC. magazine, including outlets, at their MySpace, and at their website.

My Disappearance

I got bored stiff of having to watch the troglodytes every single day with a pen and pad of paper, taking notes on the bullshit and backstabbing, so I stopped doing the Big Brother blog.

I'm in the middle of trying to write a book now, although in all honesty, I'm actually right at the beginning. For the time being, I'm going to update this place with all of the stuff I've been reviewing the past few weeks.