I’ll cut to the chase: Time is tight and it’s Black Friday and you probably have to buy a dehumidifier or something.
If you like rock, if you like power-pop, if you like guitar heroics, melodies, choruses that stick in your head for days, then let me help you part with the best £12 you will ever spend: Silver Sun’s debut album, now available for less than the price of two pints in London: £12.10.
The album came out in 1997, back when people were more interested in Wonderwalls and cutting down on their pork-life, and power-pop choruses so delicious you could eat them with a spoon weren’t exactly in vogue. But still: How Silver Sun never became huge is a mystery. The good news is that they still sound like a band holding all the best cards in a game of Cheap Trick Top Trumps.
They’re like the Raspberries if they formed a supergroup with the Ramones (the Ramonesberries!), like the Beach Boys boozing with Big Star, Badfinger getting beaten up by the Buzzcocks, and even some things that don’t involve dumb alliteration, like Teenage Fanclub crashing The Cars or Cheggers Plays Punk (argh, they DO involve it! Concentrate, man, concentrate!).
They are the middle-class Wildhearts – The Mildhearts – with an ear for a chorus that makes Jeff Lynne look lazy. Don’t take my word for it, listen to the big riffs of Golden Skin, below, or to the lyrically-bizarre Lava, with its falsetto vocals and crunchy riffs: it's like Sparks mud-wrestling The Darkness.
It’s the most incredible album you don’t own. It even LOOKS amazing, with brilliant sleeve art by Jeff Cummins who also did the cover for Whitesnake’s Live In The Heart Of The City (and the terrible sleeve for Rainbow’s Straight Between The Eyes, but let’s not mention that).
Frontman, singer, guitarist and songwriter James Broad died from bowel cancer in 2020, the same year he released Silver Sun’s last album, Switzerland. He never lived to see these reissues (yeah, if you like this, there’s more and they’re all on sale), and that’s a tragedy.
Basically: buy this album or we can’t be friends anymore.
For more discounts, check out our pick of the best Black Friday vinyl deals.
