Six tracker that is so full of beans it should be made by Heinz
Last summer – and MV will be honest about this – it was a Monday night and we couldn’t be arsed to watch England play Iceland in the Euros (there were no Stoke City players involved, you see) so took ourselves off to Leamington Spa to watch Vintage Trouble at the last minute.
Supporting Ty Taylor’s boys that night was a young band from Cheshire called Slydigs and – with all the rampant egotism of someone who runs a music website – this is what we wrote about them: “Rock n roll done right, and tracks like “Till The Morning Comes” are just sleazy enough to retain basic primal instincts – and they are evident too in singer Dean Fairhurst’s throaty roar. “To Catch A Fading Light” – played acoustically – shows a more tender side, but it seems that their heart lies in the stomps like “Stiff Upper Lip” and the closing “The Love That Keeps On Giving”. In amongst all this, they are able to call Nalle Colt, from tonight’s headline act, onstage for a medley of “Hey Joe” and “Whole Lotta Love” and if this proves they know their history, the rest shows Slydigs have a bright future.”
The six tracker they are about to unleash proves that we were good judges on this occasion (this isn’t always the case given that 20 years or so back we saw Muse on an early tour and dismissed them as “shite that would never be heard of again” …although if we were being facetious we were half right about that…..)
One of the songs mentioned in the review, “…. Light” is here and remains a glorious, country tinged strum, think something akin to “Chinese Lanterns” from The Temperance Movement’s first album and you’d be somewhere close.
Mention of TTM is deliberate too, given that not since the moment they burst onto the scene have we heard a band that is so happy to embrace the past while offering something new for the future – and all the while managing to do so with three-minute shiny rock n roll classics.
The first line of the title track gives it away (and by the way this is after there’s been a guitar solo) “gasoline Jean, yeah she knows what I mean, she blows cigarette smoke through my tambourine”. It doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t need to. Just those words tell you it is timeless rock n roll from The Stones downwards and moreover that all is right with the world.
“One Of These Days” which follows, gleefully marches off down a delta blues type path, while “Give It Up Brother” – the undoubted highlight here – boasts a chorus so catchy you probably need to go to the clinic to be vaccinated against it.
Merrily moving between rock and blues just because it can, “Suburban Confinement” does the latter, but does so with a stomp that is rare.
The other ballad here, “The Kids Feel Underrated” finds them in reflective mode, but kicking in with a mighty, soaring chorus that has a wonderful maturity.
Whether these kids feel underrated only they’d know but they shouldn’t. This is a brilliant EP from a band who is primed and ready for a breakthrough.
Can you dig it?
Rating 9/10
