Shortly due to appear, at an Arena near you, with Pennywise on the Deconstruction tour, Snuff have been around since 1986, emerging out of the post-Jam punk scene that also produced bands like the Mega City Four.Together with The Wildhearts, who appeared several years later, they came up with a sound that was to be later adopted by Americans like Green Day,The Offspring and Blink 182 and made huge. .....Still... since NONE of these bands are The MC5 or The Stooges, and therefore can't claim to have invented punk, I guess it makes no difference how LONG you've been doing it...I mean nobody ever called Green Day INNOVATIVE, right?
So...the music... Track one on this album 'Slipt' is a good punk single (I'm making assumptions about future releases here!), like The Dum Dums but a lot Motorhead-harder and more biting. The sound gets rawer still with 'Prisoner Abroad'...now on more shouty punk, currently being done very well by Plan A.... some good little musical twists...though not so arty and dissonant like Fugazi. The Title track **' Blue Gravy'** is quite bonkers... like heavy metal 'Blow Up'...Metallica meets James Taylor Quartet ...The first of several excellent instrumental tunes on this record. 'Emperor' Opens almost exactly like 'Going Underground' by The Jam...but then goes off into more standard shouty punk territory.. 'Damaged' reminds me a bit of heavier Nation of Ulysses... again another instrumental... fast and riffy as fuck... perhaps a bit Spear Of Destiny at times...all of these no bad thing... Then there follows another single-y song 'Ichola Buddha'... similar vein to the first track, though a bit more shouty... then on to another instrumental 'The Night Of The Li's'... I really like the brass on this... big band style ...again it really reminds me of Austin Powers dancing with Lemmy... very good. Finally we have two live tracks 'Caught In Session' ... full on Ska punk, and 'Ecstasy' Just plain old punk rock... but..... while these guys have more of a rootsy legitimacy to what they're doing than the Americans... I still can't help thinking Why are you still doing the same thing after all these years...I mean isn't there more territory to explore in music? This is good music...but I think it's becoming harder and harder for artists to musically remain in the same place and to justify it by saying they were there first
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7Chris Nettleton's Score