Howling At The Moon - The Punk Panther's Album Reviews

The group's best-known period came with the release of the glorious racket of a hit single that this album's title track gave them, together with an appearance of Top Of The Pops. Why they had almost become mainstream!  Ace Of Spades is, of course, a short, sharp behemoth of a single full of riffy power and gruff vocals. In fact the whole album is. Like later Ramones albums however, this album doesn't deviate from the formula much, if at all. It rocks in beautiful, frantic fashion from beginning to end, though, but give me ten minutes of it and I'm fine with that. It has been remastered for its 40th anniversary. No need. Just play it loud. A quick mention for Fast And Loose (with its cheeky lyrics) as another solid track too.

Like Boston's follow-up to their hard-rockin' debut, this one does exactly the same and is virtually identical in its sound and feel, with maybe just a bit more subtlety and dexterity in places.  Starting slowly on the comparatively pedestrian cover of the mid-sixties soul number You're No Good, we are still given plenty more of the same fare as before. Check out that glorious riff on the infectious, singalong Dance The Night Away, which was the band's most accessible, poppy number thus far, one that found girls liking it as much as sweaty male rockers. Somebody Get Me A Doctor is heavier, but no less catchy. The drum bit in the middle of Bottoms Up! reminds of the bit in the middle of Golden Earring's Radar Love from 1974. Outta Love Again has a slight funkiness to its driving riff.  Hey - guess what? Some Spanish guitar appears on the short interlude Spanish Fly! Who do they think they are - Yes? Don't worry, rockers, the chunky, evocative D.O.A. sounds like i

After several albums in which Leicester band Family struggled to create or impose any sort of identity - were they art rock, country rock, hard rock, prog rock? - this was their best-known and most successful release. For me, though, it has always been a bit disappointing. Anyway, let's start with a big positive. They had decided to go more down the hard, gritty rock with a poppy edge road and nowhere was this better exemplified than on the album's hit single opener, the magnificent Burlesque. I remember back in 1972 a friend of mine had the single (we had to share singles around due to lack of money) and we played it endlessly. We loved its authentic, bluesy sound as well as its hooky appeal. Singer Roger Chapman had that earthy, Paul Rodgers-style rugged voice and his tale of a night at a Leicester bar called Burlesque rollin', tumblin', drinkin' and sinkin' with Rita and Greta (sung rhymingly as " Greeta ") was a captivating evocative one. It was si

By 1981, many punk/new wave bands and artists were finding that they needed to diversify in order to avoid becoming like seventies boogie rock bands and releasing album after album of similar material.  Squeeze moved, like a few others, from new wave into Americana, rockabilly and country rock for the foundations of their new sound. There were even signs of soul and psychedelia in there. Or so many seem to say. To me, it sounds more like Elvis Costello's Get Happy!! but not as good. Talking of the bespectacled one, the album was actually produced by Elvis Costello - with Roger Bechirian, who had produced his Trust album from the same year - and many of his likings for country (Almost Blue from the same year, of course) clearly rubbed off on Squeeze. Chris Difford spoke glowingly of Costello's influence, saying - "I was in complete awe of working with him. It was a great challenge to come in every day with a lyric that would be better than the one he might come up with. ...

By 1980,  Graham Parker 's 1975-76 thunder had been stolen, somewhat unfortunately, by  Elvis Costello  and  Joe Jackson . Why, there were also "new wave" groups like  The Jags  who were clearly influenced by an artist who was the unsung original pioneer of the new wave.  Parker had the respect of the cognoscenti, however, and also from within the industry, including  Bruce Springsteen , who features on his song,  Endless Night  on here.  The Cars , also, I would argue, were influenced by Parker.   This is a great album of new wave rock - tuneful songs, a sneering delivery of cynical lyrics, a hint of white reggae every now and then and r'n'b pub rock.  The album starts strongly with the storming   No Holding Back , the bluesy and catchy   Devil's Sidewalk , the rocking   Stupefaction   and then the  Joe Jackson  meets early  P.I.L.  meets  Department S  rock/reggae tinges of   Empty Lives . A classic Parker song.  Then the old ""side one" ends

Another "as if punk never happened" album from Robin Trower and his mates. This time Rustee Allen joins the trio on bass and James Dewar concentrates on vocals.  There is more smooth, melodic tone to the sound now, however, and this is exhibited on the lengthy instrumental introductory passage of the opener, Somebody Calling. The track again puts me in mind of a slightly tougher Average White Band and its guitar sound definitely had tones of The Steve Miller Band's material from the same period - the Fly Like And Eagle and Book Of Dreams albums in particular. The band go all pleasantly laid-back on the next track Sweet Wine Of Love, and that gritty, Hendrix-influenced blues sound has finally given way to a blissed-out, West Coast AOR radio-friendly summery, sensual breezy groove. This soft rock was very much the antithesis of punk. These guys no doubt didn't give a damn, however. Clearly. One bad thing about punk was that some quality music like this got swept under t

I also had this album, from 1994, which, while also not up to the standard of the group's first four releases, was notable for a typically Jones piece of Madness-esque London nostalgia in Harrow Road and a good one too in the mock-grandiose and at times baroque strains of Slender Loris. It was also a much better offering than the previous two, returning, in many ways, to the Big Audio Dynamite sound I had come to live in the mid-late eighties.  The album has a bit of a muffled, slightly lo-fi sound about it, though. It could do with a remaster, but, that said, it lends a certain gently subtlety to the aural effect that many recording in the late nineties/early 200s lost through being over-loud. The pop-rock of Modern Stoneage Blues isn't bad either as too is the bouncy, bassy opener Got To Wake Up, which owes a lot to Betty Wright's Shoorah! Shoorah! in its chorus line. The bleepy, staccato sound effects bit in the middle spoils it though, briefly. Looking For A Song is arc

This is a somewhat sprawling posthumous compilation of  Joe Strummer ’s work, featuring early tracks from the  101’ers  and a fair few non-album rarities as well as collaborations with other artists as well as well-known work with  The Mescaleros .  I won’t list all the tracks, as there are thirty-two of them.  Here are a few highlights.   I am most impressed with the two  101’ers  cuts - the breakneck rockabilly of  Letsagetabitrockin   and the very  Nick Lowe -esque  Keys To Your Heart . The sound quality is excellent. It makes one remember that when Joe hooked up with  The Clash  he was certainly no green young punk, more of a gnarled veteran (comparatively), although that did not suit the “anyone can join a band” punk ethos.  Also notable is the later-era  Clash  vibe of  Trash City ; the reggae of  Ride Your Donkey ; the world music grooves of firstly the catchy  Afro-Cuban  Be-Bop  and secondly the Eastern music meets The  Clash  rock of  Sandpaper Blues ; the  Springsteen -esque

As with the previous album, Back In The Room, the old The Gift - era Jam and early Style Council influences are all over this one. Foxton’s recognisable bass is omnipresent, of course, and vocalist Russell Hastings sounds almost more like Weller than Weller does now. Weller, in fact, appears on guitar and piano on a few tracks.  Now The Time Has Come   sounds so much like something that  The Jam  may have recorded in 1982, with its tuneful, jaunty brass backing, and then re-recored by the embryonic   Style Council . The same applies to   Louder .  Round And Round  is a pulsating, funky number that would not have been out of place on  Paul Weller ’s first couple of albums, full of 1960s  Traffic  influences, while  Pictures And Diamonds  has a clear  Norwegian Wood  meets early Paul Weller groove. Great psychedelic guitar on this one.  Sunday Morning  again has Hastings and the brass section out-Wellering Weller in a  Solid Bond In Your Heart-Shout To The Top- Just Who Is The 5 O’Clock

  Although this is  The Faces ' swansong album, coming out eighteen months after their previous one, and the signs of strain are supposed to be all over it, like their  Let It Be , I have aways found it a highly enjoyable album.  Silicone Grown  is a rocking, typical Faces boogie of an opener, about the subject of breast enhancement, which was not really a  de rigeur  thing to have done back then, or to sing about, for that matter.  Who doesn't love   Cindy Incidentally ? It was a great, mid-pace rocking single - great guitars, great lyrics, great Rod Stewart vocals. Faces perfection.  "Leave the rent with the gent up in the Penthouse..." . I always loved that line. I remember for some reason in March 1973, as a teenager, going to the "Ideal Home Exhibition" with a friend. Why, I don't know. I came back with  Cindy , however. I am still not sure how. Were they selling records at the show? They must have been. I recall it had a lyric sheet in with it for

The following year, Ronnie Lane released more of the same with this album.   Looking like a rogueish gypsy patriarch on the cover, if anything, it was even more rustically folky than its predecessor, as the opening three tracks -  Little Piece Of Nothing , a re-recording of the Faces'  Stone  and  Bottle Of Brandy  - perfectly exemplify.  We also get a stirring saxophone-enhanced instrumental in the enjoyable  Street Gang , the gentle folk rock of  Anniversary  and several covers of classic standards such as the trad-jazzy  I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter , the country of  I'm Just A Country Boy , the late night torchy and bluesy strains of  Blue Monday  and Chuck Berry's Cajun romp of  You Never Can Tell .  The also Cajun-ish  Ain't No Lady , a Lane original, is fun too, as is the more mournful, organ-embellished  Give Me A Penny . There is quite a lot of Cajun accordion throughout the album, actually. In conclusion, it is another pleasant listen

It is very easy to dismiss this album of tracks that appeared on the back of 1969's huge bubblegum hit,  Sugar Sugar . After all the group were not real, they were cartoon characters and the music is played by a redoubtable, talented band of session musicians. That is of no matter to me, though.  If you like early  Beach Boys ,  The Monkees ,  The Mamas & The Papas ,  Tommy Roe's Dizzy , early  Jackson 5 ,  The Bay City Rollers , the late seventies power pop of  The Rubinoos  and early  Blondie  and summery bubblegum pop in general then this is for you.   I won't analyse every track in detail, they are probably too frothy to particularly justify that, but numbers like  Truck Driver ,  This Is Love  with its great bass line and pure  Rubinoos  vibe and  Melody Hill , which has a guitar intro similar to those used by  Bruce Springsteen  around 1977.   The songs are all driven along by a classic backing of pounding, glammy drums, throbbing bass, guitar, keyboards, female b

The Love Affair were a considerably underrated rock/soul group from the late sixties that caught on to the Small Faces/Amen Corner/Spencer Davis/Traffic psychedelic rock in places but with far more of a catchy, soulful pop sensibility to their sound with a robust brass section and young singer Steve Ellis's magnificent vocals.                        Bringing On Back The Good Times is a horn-drenched piece of poppy soul with one of those killer late sixties choruses.  Hush is a track that showed the group's liking for latter-era Small Faces-style psychedelia. It is full of swirling, crazy sixties organ, man, rumbling bass, buzzy guitar and general freaked-out vibe. Then, of course, there is Everlasting Love. This song is up there in my top ten songs of all time. I was ten when it came out and I loved it and I still do. If any song sums up the sixties for me, it is this. From the introductory huge drum beat, to the throbbing bass, the massive punch of the horns and then Steve Ell

An essential collection of early 60s rock 'n' roll Heaven here. No question about it.   The classics simply don’t stop.  Ronnie Spector ’s timeless voice on  Be My Baby   and  Baby I Love You   still sends shivers down my spine and always will. Then there is  Darlene Love ’s vocal on  He’s A Rebel  and  LaLa Brook s on  Da Doo Ron Ron  and  Then He Kissed Me .   The Righteous Brothers '  You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'  and  Unchained Melody .  The bottom line is that these are simply some of the best pure pop records you will ever hear. Is there a better intro than that on  Baby I Love You  - and when  Ronnie 's  "whoh-oh"  comes in, I am almost in tears every time. Not quite, but you know what I mean. Just wonderful. One of the best records ever made. Period.   There’s more -  Uptown ,  Not Too Young To Get Married ,  He’s Sure The Boy I Love , Do I Love You,  There’s No Other Like My Baby ,  The Best Part Of Breaking Up  and  Ronnie 's heart

What a fine, relatively obscure album this is. As far as I can see it is the only album from this San Jose, California-based "garage rock"-psychedelic band. released in 1966, it has an excellent sound quality and an enthusiastic effervescence to it, although it is not as druggy or psychedelic as one might have imagined, being far more Beatles-ish poppy.  The group's name could almost be that of a Northern Soul artist, couldn't it? Heavily-influenced by the British R'n'b-blues sound, Big Boss Man kicks off the album with a fast-paced groove, some piping organ breaks and typically mid-sixties rolling drum fills. It features some fine saxophone too. The track is an old blues cover, as indeed is Chuck Berry's Almost Grown, a catchy bluesy rock'n' roll romp about burgeoning adolescence. The tempo drops for the veery early Beatles-influenced ballad So Alone. After the verve of the first two tracks, this is a bit of a wishy-washy let-down, however. It is

Eric Clapton  had now left  The Yardbirds , a group who never seemed to be completely as one with themselves. Guitar virtuoso  Jeff Beck  had joined for what would prove to be a short stay. Despite Clapton leaving because he perceived the group to be drifting away from blues rock and towards poppier output, this album still has considerable blues influence in parts of it.  It also embraces "psychedelia" and "freakbeat" too, where weird rock mixes with the more traditional blues rhythm.   It is a good album, make no mistake, particularly in its first half, particularly on the bluesy, upbeat  Lost Women , the quirky  Over, Under, Sideways, Down  and the rousing blues rock of  The Nazz Are Blue .  It gets a tad indulgent on numbers like  Farewell  and the chanting of  Hot House Of Omagararshid , however.  Jeff's Boogie , a guitar instrumental and the catchy  He's Always There  restore the quality, though.  The freakbeat of the non-album bonus track  Psycho Dais

The Creation were formed in the UK in 1966. Shel Talmy, also involved with The Who and The Kinks, was their producer but they were unable to secure an album release in the UK, amazingly. The material that was released came from Germany. They have achieved cult status among connoisseurs of sixties psychedelic/freakbeat/mod sounds and have been hugely influenced on The Jam's early work, Paul Weller was a fan of them way back in the mid-70s. You can hear The Jam in much of the group's crashing Rickenbacker riffery. Just as The Jam were influenced by the early Who, you can hear the latter's influence on The Creation. So much of their output sounds like The Who circa 1964-66. This is an impressive compilation of the best of the group's work. An interesting piece of trivia is that on the psychedelic Making Time, they were the first group to play guitar with a bow (before Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin). Other notable tracks are the unsurprisingly punchy Batman-infliuenced Biff Ba

Hot on the heels of their sailor-suited debut, the lads swapped their suits for a rakish gypsy/dock worker look or a Panama hat and suit combo as they gave us more dockside tales. This sort of thing only takes you so far, however, and this album showed that a life on the ocean wave was short-lived. It  kicked off with a huge hit in the twenties fun of  Girls Girls Girls  and we also got another successful single in the keyboard-driven early Roxy Music meets Sparks romp of  Glass Of Champagne . Both were great singles and represented the height of Sailor's chart success.  The theme of the lovelorn but slightly dodgy travelling sailor was perpetuated in  Trouble In Hong Kong , the frantic  Stop That Man  and the frothy fun of  Panama . Tracks  like  My Kind Of A Girl ,  Coconut  and  People In Love  are all ok, but they have lost a little of the magic of the songs that the debut album offered.  Jacaranda  was an appealing instrumental but it had the feel of filler about it.  We did,

This album remans Don McLean's best-known one, due almost totally to the presence of two titanic songs.  Firstly, we have American Pie, a song that I fell in love with back in January of 1972 and have loved ever since. Like many, I'm sure, I know every word. Listening to its eight minutes plus again for the first time for a while, I am stuck by just what a great bassline it had, something that had escaped my notice for fifty years. I don't need to talk about the lyrics. They are known so well by now, as indeed are those of McLean's heartbreaking tribute to the tragic Dutch artist Van Gogh in Vincent. The rest of the album still has some good songs, mostly laid-back and gentle, including a couple of Vincent-alikes and an American Pie-alike in the energetic fun of Everybody Loves Me, Baby. Multifarious Dylan influences abound throughout the album, as do those of Johnny Cash, Paul Simon, Joan Baez, Ralph McTell, coffee house folk, John Denver and numerous protest singers s

This is a sprawling album from  Texan Gary Clark Jnr . One that explores many musical options and styles and expresses his contemporary frustration at life in Trump’s America, especially as an  African-American .  On previous albums, maybe the awesome guitar soloing was just as important as the lyrics, but on here the message is first and foremost. This is his  What’s Goin’ On  for 2019. Clark is trying to be more than simply a bluesman.  I struggle to understand the more negative criticism of the album. It think it is musically adventurous, creative and lyrically bold. It deserves many listens. The claim that none of the songs stick in one’s head is a difficult one for me to process. I find it the exact opposite. Each to their own, of course.   This Land  is an intriguing mix of contemporary hip/hop sounds and urban funk with Clark’s trademark blues guitar, which underpins the song and makes a big appearance near the end. Some superb guitar enhances the track. It would see some listen