Another Halloween treat from The Jack Rubies

By Henry Lipput

It’s scary how good this song sounds. The Jack Rubies’ new single “Phantom” (Big Stir Records) is a follow up of sorts to this year’s “Poltergeist” from the terrific Clocks Are Out Of Time album (their first in 30 years).

“Phantom” is a song that celebrates and acknowledges a time of year filled with monsters and goblins but would also, at any other time, be a major dance club hit. It’s certainly early enough in the year for the DJs in the know to pick up on this and make it part of their set (where's my 12-inch remix?). And the song is as much about the spirits that haunt us as it’s about relationships that end and create a haunted house with someone who is no longer a part of your life and seen out of the corner of your eye.

The sound of “Phantom” recalls the sounds of The Jack Rubies' original contemporaries like The Boomtown Rats (especially Mondo Bongo). There’s also some more time travel going on in the video for the song in which the band dons masks of their younger selves.

Here's the video:

Don’t mess with Carla

By Henry Lipput

You know it’s bad enough for you when you get a knock on the door or a call from a bill collector or the police but it’s even worse when it’s because you’ve done Carla Olson wrong. Especially when she has Tall Poppy Syndrome backing her up.

On the brand-new collaboration “Is It True?” (Tres Melo Musique/Carla Olson Productions) Olson joins the TPS to give a fresh coat of rock and roll paint to a Brenda Lee classic from 1964. Tall Poppy Syndrome adds some fuzz to the guitars to add a sense of menace to Olson’s take-no-prisoners vocal and backing vocals from the TPS lads bring a real 60s sound to the mix. Olson means business and makes it clearer than Brenda did that you better not have been missing around.

A solo outing

By Henry Lipput

Although the London-based glam rock band Tremendous is on hiatus, main man Mark Dudzinski isn’t wasting any time in releasing new music. His 6 song EP, Transcendence On The Cheap (digital vendors and streaming services), is, in his words, “a straight-up, stripped-down acoustic affair.”

The EP is made up of all new songs and, as special as they are right now, it’s easy to imagine how terrific they will sound when his band takes the stage to glam them up a bit more (can we look forward to a  live Transcendence Part II?). “Innocent Soho,” one of my favorite songs on the EP, is the seemingly lovely tune but turns out to be about a scary evening in a rough part of the city.

One of the first songs I heard from Tremendous was 2018’s “Rock n’ Roll Satellite.” I liked the idea that they had merged power pop and glam rock. But on Transcendence On The Cheap there’s less Raspberries and more T Rex. In fact with Dudzinski on acoustic guitar the new EP sounds like a solo Marc Bolan trying out new songs on a John Peel BBC session that never happened.

The song of the lonely living room dancer

By Henry Lipput

“When The Radio Plays” (Jangleshop Records) is the second single by Shapes Like People, the husband-and-wife duo of Carl Mann and Kat Mann, from next year’s Ticking Haze album.

Like Paul McCartney’s “Another Day” and The Pearlfishers’ “Love & Other Hopeless Things” Shapes Like People blends both happiness and melancholy. And it has one of my favorite opening lyrics of any recent song:

Happiness comes and goes like buses

If only I was on time.

Kat’s vocal hits both the joy and sadness in a song about a woman who is always missing the chance to find love but keeps up her spirits by dancing to her favorite songs when they’re played on the radio. With Carl’s chunky guitar riffs and cool synth strings the song is not far from the disco songs that occasionally make her happy.

Carl, of the UK band The Shop Window, has said he “needed a female vocal for some demos he planned to pitch to other artists. To get a feel for what they might sound like he asked Kat to sing and relace his guide vocals but couldn’t bring himself to part with the songs afterwards.” And so Shapes Like People was born.