It's that time of the week when we comb through a veritable tonne of new tunes from a range of artistes (an especially healthy crop of new faces this week), and offer up the best as sacrifices...no, not sacrifices, but for you guys to judge with a suitable amount of astute brutality. As ever, we have no idea who'll sway your vote, and it's always great to see what you rate the highest. Loads of you came out and voted last week, and below are the bands that made your top three. In reverse order they are:
3. Hunter & The Bear - Electric
2. Greystone Canyon - In These Shoes
1. The Amorettes - Whatever Gets You Through the Night
Bravo Team Amorettes! And to Greystone Canyon and Hunter & The Bear for hard-earned second and third places. Now, check out this week's selection then vote for your favourite at the foot of this page. But first, let's have a spin of The Amorettes' first prize-winning track from last week. Enjoy...
Greta Van Fleet - When The Curtain Falls
Baby Led Zeppelin (aka Greta Van Fleet) strike again with more gloriously, outrageously familiar classic rock shindiggery. Born in late ‘90s/early ‘00s Michigan, by way of ‘70s London, the Gen Z foursome have seemingly skipped hip-hop, pop, RN’B and….well, pretty much anything favoured by most of their contemporaries, and still managed to win them over with the kind of music their parents have probably been trying to foist upon them for ages. Whether you love GVF’s mad nostalgia skills, or scoff at them, something’s definitely building there...
John J Presley - True Love Waits
The new track from electric bluesman/singer-songwriter John J Presley is a menacingly slow, eerie affair. Boasting one of those deep, Tom Waits-nodding voices that’ll make you want to start smoking again (or take it up anew, or just smoke more…), he mixes raw garagey tones with a haunting early blues underbelly. If you want something dark and atmospheric to contrast with the sun of late, this is it.
Tequila Mockingbyrd - Enjoy The Ride
The latest tune from these guys could’ve come from a 90s chick flick soundtrack – in a good way (less straight-to-DVD shite, more witty classics like Clueless, Ten Things I Hate About You et al). They’ve certainly sounded deeper and dirtier than this (on the heavier, earlier likes of I Smell Rock N Roll), but sweet-as-pie indie vibes and power-pop singalongs suit them too. Who knows what they’ll do next, but in the meantime we’re (appropriately enough) enjoying the ride….
Palaye Royale - You’ll Be Fine
Full disclosure: these Vegas-born rockers may annoy some you at first glance. ‘Look at those snot-nosed kids with their silly hair, My Chemical Romance guyliner (what is this, fucking 2009??) and wardrobe from the Johnny Depp house of retro dandy-chic: this is going to be awful, right?’ Wrong. They won us over before with the strutting, Rolling Stones-meets-The Killers likes of Get Higher, and now come bearing more but with an added macabre cabaret twist – written “in the perspective of a schizophrenic patient”. All finished off with a soaring chorus that keeps them firmly rooted in the present.
Ryder’s Creed - Raise The Hoof
Get your motor running, head out on the highway.... Ok this definitely isn’t that song, but somehow the ‘goodtime machine-gun’ guitar chug at the heart of this (once it gets going) made us think of it – even if this is otherwise rather more hard-rock/metallic in nature than anything Steppenwolf or Mars Bonfire did. Nodding in no unsubtle way to their endorsers Cloven Hoof rum (rock-loving makers of lovely “spiced rum blended in hell”, nice…) it’s full-throttle, riff-munching music to get lovably battered to.
Say the band: “We had a lot of fun writing it and even more fun making the video.... Lots of Cloven Hoof was involved in the process…” Yeah, we bet.
No Fit State - Need Your Love
Next up we’ve got a duo from Leeds mixing new-school blues with fuzzy vintage rock beef – think early Black Keys, with one foot in a pool of classic stalwarts like Zeppelin. They need your love, and based on this cool, swaggering piece of sass, we reckon you could do an awful lot worse than giving it to them...
Jacob Reese Thornton - Bombs Away
Taken from debut LP Different Times, produced by Grammy winner Bob Kulick and Bobby Ferrari, Bombs Away spits, snarls and swaggers with cocksure va-va-voom. If Green Day spent more time jamming ‘70s classic rock, it might sound like this.
You may not know him yet, but Jacob’s already traded licks onstage with Buddy Guy, racked up about two million social media views and the aforementioned debut features Slash & The Conspirators man Todd Kerns. Oh yeah, and he’s only 15. Shit...
Atari Ferrari - Just Wanna Know Ya
Atari Ferrari. Atari. Ferrari. Just saying it made us crack a smile, and that was before we’d heard the song. This Spokane-based foursome’s name might be a slightly odd mashup (retro video gaming and high-performance cars? Sure, why not…), but the music knows exactly what it’s all about: dirty, driving rock’n’roll with a lasciviously decadent streak, built around scuzzy guitar hooks good enough to eat. Check out more on upcoming album, Rebel.
