Table Scraps – Sick of Me (2017)

Noise rock outfit turned band support, Table Scraps, are your average attic rockers striving for more.  Making a small name for themselves supporting Buzzcocks, The Stranglers and more recently, The Black Lips, the Birmingham trio are occupying their time emerging from the heathen underground sewer, just to throw on a suit and squeeze into the path of a sweat-condensated spotlight.

Hitting off with your general two-chord surf-punky riff, the new single ‘Sick Of Me‘ does stick on the ears, albeit less like a totally radical rocker piercing and more like Ben Stiller’s ‘hair wax’.  Lyrically ticking off relationship-based rhetoric and laying into intermittent guitar drones, frontman Scott Vincent Abbott shouts the whiney harmonies you might have expected from The Kills, but on repeat features as more of an angsty Ting Tings; and with ‘Sick Of Me’ being the primary single from their upcoming album Autonomy, the band aren’t saying as much as they could.

The easy-going chord progressions and overall chantability of ‘Sick Of Me’poke the ironic title monster acting as cornerstones of a song with little foundation. Although the chords are warm and the drums are a near-bliss white noise, on the whole, it’s a stripped down, bare bones affair without a hint of the grandiosity of the likes of Mosshart and Hince, and minus the cockiness of the 90’s Sabbath riffs and the Sleigh Bells-y vocals heard in previous material.  It’s how you’d imagine the guys that didn’t win the Battle of the Bands in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World – no, not those guys, the ones who lost to them, the ones who came fifth.  Yeah, those guys.

Without deconstructing the punk-rock genre itself and actively using the term “moshability”, the minimalism on show here says that there is absolutely nothing to hold Table Scraps back from radio coverage for the next…two weeks?  Trading the, albeit blasé, faster-paced material for stripping down and rocking out for the sake of rocking out is a bold move – take George Michael, for instance.  This band, however, are plunged into the land of the underdeveloped where the most scintillating part of the song is the comparatively jarring use of a ride cymbal; a simplified, average and perhaps more commercial break.  Better clear the table.

 

 

Autonomy is due for release on February 23, 2018, by independent record label Zen Ten.