Released a few weeks ago, the band's debut, Anything Can Tempt Me, opens with what has become the band's trademark tune, the four-beat, foot tapping keyboard number, Concession. But, like too many local indie releases, Anything Can Tempt Me (
The album's highlight is the five-and-a-half minute mild-dance number Radical Life. A corker of a tune on which the trio's instrumentation duels it out with vocalist, Chen Hui-ting's (
Given the originality of the
aforementioned tune, if Tizzy Bac employed a producer and an engineer who knew their asses from their elbows, then the combo would be one of the few local acts that has what it takes to breathe new life into a stale market built around pap-pop.
The Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks Merge
One of the most musically astute acts to emerge from the fledgling UK punk scene of the mid-1970s, The Buzzcocks first made a name for itself as a support act for the Sex Pistols. Unlike Rotten and company, however, The Buzzcocks could actually play their instruments and, more importantly, possessed quite a bit of musical know-how.
The band's debut album, 1978's Another Music in a Different Kitchen and that same year's Love Bites -- the album that gave the world Ever Fallen in Love -- were both huge hits. Splitting up after 1979's Different Kind of Tension, Pete Shelley went onto pursue a solo career until 1989, when the band reformed.
Although subsequent albums by the new-look Buzzcocks -- Trade Test Transmission, All Set and Modern -- had their moments, they all lacked the pop-guitar jangle of early Buzzcocks material. Now, 27 years after the band first hit the scene as part of the "Anarchy in the UK Tour," comes an album packed with original Buzzcocks material that contains more hard-edged lucidity than albums by many of today's "punk wannabe fratboy acts."
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