Album Review: Salad Boys – Salad Boys (2013)

I’ve been really impressed by this new release debut album from Christchurch’s Salad Boys. It’s available as a name-yer-price download from the band’s Bandcamp page. Get it here.

Recorded in Christchurch over the latter half of 2012, the album feels like a genuine throwback to the Flying Nun glory days of the mid Eighties, with the jangly guitar, bedsit-style vocals, and clever lyrics immediately prompting recall of great bands like The Clean, The Bats, and The Chills.

I note the band also made a cassette version available (a limited edition of 75, at $5.00 each). To be fair, as this was a February release, I suspect these will have all been snapped up by now, but that type of thinking is kind of cool, and something that fits perfectly with the band’s nostalgia-tinged modus operandi.

Highlights include: the instrumental opener ‘Eighteen Forty Four’, ‘Daytime Television’ (very psychedelic clip below), ‘Here’s No Use’, and ‘Best Kept Secret’ ... and the eight-track album download is supplemented with a pretty decent cover version of Wire’s ‘Strange’. Great stuff.

Salad Boys are: Joe Sampson - guitar, vocals, Ben Odering - bass, and James Sullivan - drums. (Sullivan is also a member of the last young Kiwi band to really impress me live – Bang Bang Eche – who I also raved about here).

Salad Boys play live at Puppies bar in Wellington on April 20 2013 in support of (ironically enough) Mr Clean himself, David Kilgour. I’m pretty sure they’ll be shit hot.