Everyone’s favourite punk poppers Bowling For Soup returned with a new album ‘Drunk Dynasty’ in October 2017.
As part of the ongoing promotion for the album, they’ve also released a brand new video for ‘Catalyst’ – a recent radio favourite – directed by BFS frontman Jaret Reddick. The full video can be seen below.
This Minneapolis based garage rock band is entirely unpretentious. At no point do these musicians stretch too far beyond their garage-ish musical limits – limits that are occasionally just a little too obvious – nor do they display any kind of ego. By their own admission, J. Eastman & The Drunk Uncles are rather shambolic. Still, a fairly loose and carefree attitude has got them so far and this third release works very much on a maxim of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Or in the case of the Uncles, it might even be “if it sounds a bit broke, let’s swill some booze and knock things about until they sound better.”
True to their word, bits of ‘No Capo Required’ do indeed sound sloppy. That said, you’ll have heard sloppier…and sometimes from bands who actually genuinely believe they’re the very acme of musical perfection.
Highrider’s 2016 EP really meant business. Within twenty minutes, the Swedish In Flames obsessives growled, thrashed and pounded their way through four almost faultless tunes that owed so much to the past, especially with a root in classic thrash – and yet still sounded contemporary for the time of release. An unlikely soundtrack for the summer, that short look into a world that blended thrash with melodic hardcore and 70s hard rock organs promised so much for the inevitable full length debut. A year on, ‘Roll For Initiative’ expands on those musical themes and results in a more mixed album. Within the eight featured tracks, you’ll hear more of the things that made Highrider an instant success, but also a few experiments that aren’t quite as immediate.
Irish sludge metallers Zhora have released a second video to promote their second album ‘Ethos, Pathos, Logos’.
Boston retro rockers Watts are one of those bands who seem to have got better with each album. Hearing their work chronologically is very telling: although 2010’s rough and ready ‘On The Dial’ has enjoyable moments, it’s blown out of the water by 2015’s ‘Flash of White Light’, which in turn isn’t as thrilling as the best moments of 2016’s ‘Black Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll’. At the heart of it all, of course, there’s always been that love for The Stones, the grubbiness of Johnny Thunders and the general trashiness of ‘Let It Be’ era Replacements…but there’s no escaping the idea that they just got better at their craft. That’s better than a band who put out a couple of stellar albums and then swim the murky waters of inconsistent art (Manic Street Preachers, we’re looking at you). With all that in mind, though, Watts were unlikely to top ‘Black Heart’.