Voila! The eponymous debut album from Glasgow’s finest hillbilly rockers Cuddly Shark will be released on Monday 9th November . Recorded by Scott Maple (Le Reno Amps) and Ross McGowan (Dananananaykroyd, We Are the Physics), Cuddly Shark encapsulates the band’s purist plug in and play ethos with a touch of ice cold rock’n’roll. Idiosyncratic lyricism and odd anti-melodies combined with foot down pedal-to-the-metal performances prove deadly in this trios hands.
Cuddly Shark were born and bred in the bonnie highlands of Scotland. Two thirds masculine and one third feminine, the band consists of Colin Reid on guitar and vocals, Ruth Forsyth on bass guitar and vocals, and Jason Sinclair on drums and vocals. Magnetically drawn to the rain-soaked musical hotspot that is Glasgow things have been going swimmingly for the sharp-toothed threesome.
Rock solid with the minimum of fuss, Cuddly Shark songs are anarchic and free spirited. From the opening thrash of ‘Bowl of Cherries’, by all accounts a sonic fit of standing on your toes and singing right in your face, to the Pixies like donkey kick of ‘Woody Woodpecker’, an ode to all those people that peck at your head until you can’t take it anymore. Proving they have more hooks than a tackle box the furious delivery and pace of ‘The Punisher of IV30’, referring to the Elgin post-code where the band members grew up, befits the contradictory nature of the band name as this lot can bark like a nutcase at a bus stop. Listen on and it’s clear linear songwriting isn’t on the menu with the dog-on-the-prowl nuttiness of ‘Mannybix’, and the epic 52 second ode to self-indulgence, ‘Jamie Foxx on Later With Jools Holland’.
Flexing their musical pecks the album centres around the downbeat travelling tune ‘Whiteoaks’, and the hillbilly punk of 70’s country standard ‘Boney Fingers’. Jason from the band enthuses, “How could we not cover this song when we found out it was by a guy called Hoyt Axeton, what kind of a name is Hoyt!?! Then to find out he was the dad in Gremlins I mean how cool can you get, the tunes nae bad either!”
Elsewhere the record boasts fat slabs of post punk grit with feverish rockers, ‘What Goes Around’, the Zeppelin baiting latest single, ‘The Sheriff of Aspen Bay’, and the crunching riffage of ‘12 Months’, where a year spent involuntary abstaining from sexual relations has never sounded so brutally demonic! The album draws to a close with the glorious ‘Instru-Mentalist’ and the Caledonian stomp of ‘Shakey Baby’ which wages war on political correctness with the shameless sing-along jaunt, “see the lady with the baby, grab the baby, hold the baby, shake the baby, jelly baby, got me a syndrome!”.
Brimming with punk attitude and spilling over with melodic brilliance Cuddly Shark will never have an ounce of pretentious hip fat on them. Their live shows have seen comparisons made to Husker Du, Minor Threat, Ween, Fugazi and Weezer. Yet Cuddly Shark are unmistakably their own entity, a blistering romp of rock’n’roll carnage firing as loud as they can from a post-rock cannon.
