Nightingales - Four Against Fate - LP/CD/DD - 22nd May 2020
Four decades young and still railing against life's tediums, trials and tribulations, Midlands mavericks Nightingales follow up 2018's Perish The Thought with their third full set on Tiny Global and it's a rousing bruising brutal beauty of an album.
Dispensing with anything so trivial as song-structures, choruses and superfluous fripparies, Four Against Fate is probably the closest Robert Lloyd's charges have come to creating a (cough) 'pop' album. Tune into Neverender for some baritonal crooning and a memorable hook, replete with some trademark harmonies, cheerful keyboards and clattering percussion. Head to Devil's Due which starts off a little bit like Booker T's Time Is Tight before intuitive interplay takes the whole song over, transporting us to a time when we could all witness it live.
Everything, Everywhere, All Of The Time sees Violet Bliss deliver a world-weary rhetoric of mundanity and routine against a backdrop of retro drumbox and fidgety guitars while things get full-on psych-glam with the album's biggest stomper The Other Side on which Lloyd opines "ooooh take me, take me to the other side..". And blow us all down, the handclaps kick in half way through and the world's a better place. As usual there are tankfuls of time-signature changes for those whose hips are already dislocated from previous Nightingales albums and plates of barbed lyrical couplets.
Ultimately, picking highlights from Four Against Fate is futile - the album needs to be listened to in one sitting (and plenty more after) with a supply of your favourite accompaniments and a volume-knob flicked to 10.
8/10
Dispensing with anything so trivial as song-structures, choruses and superfluous fripparies, Four Against Fate is probably the closest Robert Lloyd's charges have come to creating a (cough) 'pop' album. Tune into Neverender for some baritonal crooning and a memorable hook, replete with some trademark harmonies, cheerful keyboards and clattering percussion. Head to Devil's Due which starts off a little bit like Booker T's Time Is Tight before intuitive interplay takes the whole song over, transporting us to a time when we could all witness it live.
Everything, Everywhere, All Of The Time sees Violet Bliss deliver a world-weary rhetoric of mundanity and routine against a backdrop of retro drumbox and fidgety guitars while things get full-on psych-glam with the album's biggest stomper The Other Side on which Lloyd opines "ooooh take me, take me to the other side..". And blow us all down, the handclaps kick in half way through and the world's a better place. As usual there are tankfuls of time-signature changes for those whose hips are already dislocated from previous Nightingales albums and plates of barbed lyrical couplets.
Ultimately, picking highlights from Four Against Fate is futile - the album needs to be listened to in one sitting (and plenty more after) with a supply of your favourite accompaniments and a volume-knob flicked to 10.
8/10