Bad Pennies turn up a new Oil City Connection …
The Department for Transport can forget their planned ‘third Thames crossing’ as Bad Pennies have already made one linking the Medway with Canvey in their debut album.
Many of the fourteen all-original tracks on Songs From The Medway Delta evokes the Feelgood factor, as instantly evident in the raw opener Crash & Burn with its thud-whack basic beat, brassy guttural slide and Brill(eaux) snarled vocals. Plunger were just thinking all it’s missing is some harp, and bingo, there it was. (To be fair, the standard of Gary Seager’s guitar is actually higher than that comparison would suggest!)
That feel continues in the jerky aggressive Lady Luck, a striding One Shot (Ballad Of A No Good) and the rattling-paced Please Baby. Even the extended melodic guitar noodling intro to Walk Away soon gives way to more gruff vox and choppy schlangy rhythm playing, also a feature of the SRVish Mynah Bird.
Straying further from Oil City are the brooding AM Blues (a.m. blues? A minor blues? the choice is yours...); the breathless 50s R’n’R canter of Temperance Boogie; and a couple of rootsier acoustic numbers. Medicine Man’s Waitsy jokey Okie rag suits Adam Stocker’s gravel-and-molasses vocal, and it’s equally fitting for the finger-picked resonator Delta slide of Losing Streak (and to Plunger’s ears drummer Dave Two-Jackets sounds a lot more comfortable in these latter three numbers than in many of the other songs).
The thrashy Midnight Train shows a heavier (more Plunger-friendly) side, that also appears in the edgy, early-AC/DC thumbs-in-belt-loop boogie of Queen Of All The City complete with laddish shoutalong chorus, and in the raucous Hometown Blues.
Plunger regard the raw pub-rock sound as a regrettable mistake of the 70s (like Watneys Red Barrel or Double Diamond) but plenty folks love it, as shown by the IBBA air time given to the Bad Pennies’ EP in 2016.
If you do like that kind of thing, then you’ll like this kind of thing…
Songs From The Medway Delta is out now, on all the usual outlets or from their website, http://www.badpennies.co.uk/Bad_Pennies/Shop.html
