Cuddly Shark – The Road To Ugly
By Kenny McMurtrie
January 28, 2013
Album number two from the Elgin bred & Glasgow-based trio is a somewhat more measured affair than you’d have expected after the full-on sound of last October’s Body Mass Index ep. Things start off fairly fast with ‘SPMG’ & stay that way with one of the two ep songs that have graduated to album inclusion, ‘Overpriced’ (the other being the earlier work’s title track), but that pace is not consistently maintained throughout the rest of the album.
‘Broken Arm’, track number three, provides quite a sea change. A semi-acoustic number, it further raises the bar for the band’s abilities and whilst being musically removed from the punkier aspects of their output shows that there is much more to them than a cursory listen would have you think. ‘Fiddly Dee’ begins with bagpipes but happily those are there merely as a precursor to what ends up being a brief, tongue in cheek, folky instrumental.
‘Doodlebug’ retains some of that folk feel, albeit with more of an Appalachian kind of stomp behind it. Superchunk come to mind on the lively ‘My iPod Made Me Do It’ as vocalist Colin Reid yelps his way along over Ruth Forsyth’s rumbling bassline. Things calm back down on the sweeter, dual-voiced and poppier ‘Trigger Happy’. After that we get the more trademark sound of ‘Pull the Finger Out’ followed by some more folky and country leanings (‘The Devil In You’, ‘Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind’) before proceedings are wound up with the stripped back balladry of ‘Local Hero’. The envelope’s not exactly being pushed here then but there is definitely a greater depth being revealed and all the band has to do now is capitalise on that.
The Road To Ugly is released by Armellodie Records and available on amazon
