The Needles

Prick up your ears and warn your dancing feet. Happy Days are here again - quite literally - courtesy of Scottish outfit The Needles whose shining debut offering is set to extend your summer.
Kicking off with a cosmic, tantalizing synth build, it only takes seconds for this to grab you and very soon frontman Dave Dixon promises he won't ‘Let You Down'. How true, as then follows wicked stand-out track ‘Under The City' which aficionados will recall from the critically-acclaimed 2004 EP of the same name. Alluring you into the arms of Razorlight with its climactic drum intro and initial Borrell-esque vocals, by the chorus you're relieved to be in the bosom of a band with a lot more bounce and a lot less audacity.
And the charm continues, tickling your fancy at every turn. Nostalgic appeal is essential to the album's continuity with obvious early rock n'roll inspiration taking you back to a more modest time. The quartet show us they give a folk in mellow ditty ‘Poison Ivy', are born to hand-jive in ‘Up Against The Wall' and then flirt with ‘turning Japanese' in ‘Dianne'! Combining the rough with the smooth, the chaos with the simplicity, makes for a fantastic ride through a few musical decades - bumping into Weezer, The Byrds and The Coral along the way.
Pumped with pop pizzazz, spiked with punk and caressed with luscious harmonies, there's something superbly confident and refreshingly pertinent about this record. Full of intentions, without trying too hard to side-step the rest, The Needles have delivered something they can run with.
Their 12-track disco, which also boasts distinctly memorable seasonal single ‘Summer Girls', winds down with ‘In The Morning', a perfect slow dance to end the night. Dixon croons “I never did like getting up in the morning”, the irony being his album may just be the ideal alarm.