In Your Eye
'Summer Girls' is the second single from Aberdeen's The Needles and let's face it, it's a terrible generic title. Having achieved moderate recognition with their debut single 'Dianne' The Needles will surely be looking to build on their growing reputation but I'm not sure they're going to do much of that with this track. The song itself is rather average, it's not bad but it doesn't really go anywhere, nothing about it really stands out; it's not uplifting or rampaging or beautiful, it just trundles along in an average kind of way.
Their press release goes on about them loving raw and exciting rock and roll but there's not much evidence of that on this track. There's nothing wrong with The Needles as such but they're the sort of band that works on the same level as The Rakes; they have a few good tunes but they never do enough to really take the world by storm.
The second track 'How Come it Doesn't Rain' sounds a lot like Elvis Costello and a bit like Mr Costello it's a bit flat, a bit mainstream and a bit crap. The opening chord progressions in the verse are so predictable it's almost cringe worthy, it's easy enough on the ear but there's no spark and it could have been written by any one of a thousand bands. Costello only gets away with it because he did it first!
'Starting to Worry' at last injects a bit of danger to proceedings, it's a bit faster and provides a much needed edge that the preceding songs would have benefited from. At least it shows that The Needles do have the capability to produce something on a level to really compete with their contemporaries.