Song reviews

Imagine calling your song after your band? Alansmithee nearly manage to do that with their single “Alan Smithee” but the drifting psych-rock groove suggests that the musical motivation may have been a chemically powered mind expanding moment. The guitar engine gets revved erratically towards the end just before the song heroically and untidily collapses. Yesterday is, once more, the new today.

You can’t beat that melting pot of time travelling musical influences that powers Glasgow scenesters Kick To Kill on their journey down life’s urban highway. “Dreams” postures in an emotionally meaningful way but click those electro powered heels three times and you’ll be in eighties, mascara for everyone, territory before you know it.

Feet of Clay, who are from Coatbridge, are certainly not short of energy and “Revenge of Icarus” is evidence of that with some truly spirited guitar work providing the source of the momentum that drives the song along the rock track towards beer drinking nirvana. Not bad at all.

Earnest if conventional in her approach, Zoe Louk smartly turns up the emotion to compensate and consequently turns “Up To Me” into the kind of honest ballad that should find a friend or four in mainstream radio.

There’s a thin line between respectful and derivative in the big bad world of rock music and Zouaves walk that line with “Wear It Thin”. They have the energy right but they still sound too much like their influences for their own long term good.

“Black Magic” is kind of old fashioned in its approach but that is not to the song’s disadvantage as Luna Green’s affected vocals are never less than appealing and the song is, when all is said and done, nothing less than a pop song of the old school.

Girlish vocals reinforce the innocent vibe that powers “Let Us Stay in the Light” and allows it to float like a fluffy cloud over the eighties style locked to the loop backing track. This is the kind of song that they use as the soundtrack to a montage in an American television drama.

Middle of the road seems to be the course that Freddy and The Medicines are steering with “Tides” being the kind of earnest duet that might best be used to sell life insurance or pension plans. The song is a professional piece of work in other words and will undoubtedly make more money than anything else that I have heard this week.

I don’t know what I did to deserve this honour but here we are and “Bigger Than Ron Jeremy” is the work of – apparently anyway – a former porn star from the seventies. Bruce Thunderbollocks is indeed the kind of name that you would expect a porn star of the seventies to use should he ever release an old style mirror ball funk workout that features the kind of lyrical bravado that you don’t see outside of gangsta these days. The song therefore does not disappoint on that level and it might just be the best song of the week. Or not. Probably not.

Neatly reverential to the halcyon days of synth-pop, Apache Darling set the sequencer to pulsate the rhythm of “More Than Me” to the beat of complexity and thus indicate that they have actually learned something from those that have gone before them. The passionate female vocals sit sometimes sit awkwardly on top of the electronics but all is saved by a crowd pleasing chorus.

Despite being somewhat forced and awkward, “Dover” shows that Finnish band Junes Garden can do melodrama in that meaningful mainstream rock ballad style that still occasionally troubles the charts even if the song itself never really gets up to speed.

Oh, you can never have too much Americana. Actually you can but at least Swedish band Crowpush leave the oft visited dustbowl behind in favour of a walk in the shadows of a genre renowned for not having any. “Weak As Water” is therefore unexpectedly high on atmosphere and all the better for that.