I grew up in the grunge era. I was about 19 when Kurt Cobain and his friends arrived, and while I loved Alice In Chains, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t into everything that was branded “grunge”.
There’s a false narrative that still goes around that grunge was supposed to have killed rock music. It didn’t. What it killed was crap rock music.
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen Faster Pussycat play a brilliant set and Bon Jovi perform in front of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium. So how much of the hard rock of the ’80s and ’90s was really laid to rest?
The Bites weren’t alive then, by the looks of it, but they clearly wish they were. Just like their first album from three years back, Squeeze, this sef titled affair is an absolute cracker.
“Whenever You’re Ready” has melody and catchy choruses. Maybe it isn’t quite as sleazy as some of the records that inspired it, but it still has a certain something.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just happy to be here,” sings Jordan Tyler on “Hold On”, and that sums up the whole thing. The choruses soar, the solos do the same and this is music made to be played live.
“Lips” is designed to get fists in the air. It wants to sound like early Def Leppard and isn’t bothering to hide the fact. Why should it?
The overriding feeling is that this is simply a load of blokes playing the music they love. “Dancing With The Devil” has a title that must have been used about a million times, but originality isn’t the point. Instead, it offers a primal blues feel and enough swagger to carry it through.
Groove, baby, groove. That’s the best way to summarise “Pretty Pistol”, while first single “Aftertaste” concerns a girl Tyler knows is bad for him. We’ve all been there, but this has the ebullience of a five-year-old on a Skittles bender.
I’ve always been a sucker for some handclaps, and “Shake Your Thing” has them. It cheers everything up even further and, once again, you know it is made for the stage. When The Bites play festivals, they are going to be the favourite band of the afternoon.
Sparks fly on “Carry You Home” like a Roman candle mixed with TNT. That’s how The Bites see the world: one lot of pyro after another.
On “Playing The Fool”, Tyler is doing his best to impress a girl. For all those who have tried and failed, let’s hope he gets her.
The acoustic guitars come out for “Waiting” and you assume this is where the obligatory ballad arrives. Whether it was “The Ballad Of Jayne”, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” or countless others, bands like this always had one. The Bites, though, switch gears halfway through and the Chuck Berry-style solo is absolute class.
“Tattoos?” ends things with five and a half minutes of glorious excess. Already released as a taster, it simply doubles down on the sleaze and sexiness of the entire record.
Bon Jovi had James Bay supporting them at Wembley. They should have taken a band like The Bites and championed the new breed of hard rock, because the new breed doesn’t get much better than this.
This would have been played in The Rainbow back in the day, and these boys would have been cover stars.
Their first album might have been Squeeze, but this time The Bites put their own name on it—and they’re purring like never before.
Rating: 9/10
