This is the fourth Kraut Nightingales album recorded at Faust Studio and has brain scans of frontman Robert Lloyd on the sleeve. it's a stark hello and then the album comes barreling out of the speakers like a classic Nightingales record with For Goodness Sake. It has an insistent guitar motif threat around which everything else is built as the lyrics go off on a sort of hell ride.
The Only Son starts like it could be a Sam And Dave song until the vocals come in to spoil the poppy beginning only for the backing vocals to enter and make it sound like a very old soul record being re-worked for the dour times we find ourselves in. That or a long lost outtake from Robert's solo album, Me And My Mout,h only with more modern-sounding drums and a deeper voice these days.
The Man That Time Forgot seems to be about the break-up of a band or is it a relationship? Fliss Kitson's vocals come in halfway; angry as hell riot girl bile spouting through the speakers as a counterpoint to what Robert Lloyd has been going on about. It's a great fight song.
Ripe Old age has a finger-snapping opening and a late night Barry Adamson Jazz noir feel to it. Taffy Come Home seems almost too nice to be a Nightingales song but only lyrically and with the almost space age backing vocals that help make the lyrics (about leeks and daffodils) gel with the typically obtuse indie music. At times the backing vocals sound like Block Buster by The Sweet. Yes, it needs to be heard the be believed!
For Different Folks is an instrumental (or near as dammit) with some very odd brass sounds and someone hitting what sounds like a metal bar of some sort over distorted guitars like it should be in the background of a grim torture scene in a horror flick. Well, until the bird noises come in at the end as the killer leaves the crime scene. The almost-raga like intensity of Stroke Of Genius then comes in with Fliss Kitson's vocals almost buried beneath the whirlpool of sounds. It's progressive psychedelic indie and brilliant with it.]
Bitch seems to be a sort of Kitchen sink melodrama played out over clattering stop/start racket. Is he really like Franz Kafka? Well, all right, maybe. It's followed by the playful But... It's musically playful even if the lyrics are a touch disturbing and as you'd expect at times hard to understand.
|
Gales Doc is the Nightingales' own version of John Cale's Autobiography crossed with Pere Ubu's Story Of My Life as they tell you how to put together your very own Nightingales song. All the ingredients and how to put them together are presented over, well, a typical Nightingales song. It's great and for me the best song on the album. I love the simple riff it's based around; very cool and very clever, especially as he sounds like he's interviewing himself at one point as he explains the quiet/loud part of the song.
Great British Exports thankfully doesn't sound like the sort of Ad jingle a title like that might suggest. Instead, Robert sings about cups of tea and boasts about some of our other so called great exports like Mumford and sons and Midsomer Murders!! The album closes with Bit Of Rough which has an old school rock and roll feel to the opening before the normal madness resumes to let us know this is going to finish in the sort of cacophony and repeating riff logic we've come to expect from The Nightingales.
If you already like the Nightingales then you'll love this album. If you've always wanted one record by them but didn't know where to start this is a good point of entry as it's a pretty classic Nightingales record.
The Nightingales online
Louder Than War online
|
