Wine Lips TV Dinner

Cut It; Projector; Trip To The Doctor; Maybe You Can Give It A Shot; Head On Backwards; Leech; Giant Man Baby; Thirst Trap; Semi Detached Furnished Home; If You Don't Know; Fried V; Strip Club DJ; Static On The Radio.

Stomp Records
Album release date: 28th August.


Infectious. This is the word that springs to mind listening to TV Dinner, the 5th album from the Canadian garage punks Wine Lips. Shortly after the opening riffs of Cut It if you don’t find yourself madly flailing round the living room, then there is surely something wrong. By the end of the second track, Projector, which has an Amyl and the Sniffers vibe, you will find yourself checking out when and where they are touring and booking a ticket, never mind it’s two hundred miles away. This is the energising effect of listening to TV Dinner, an album where you definitely need to give it the full volume to fully let the riffs take hold.

The album feels like an encapsulation of everything that is good about Wine Lips: fast riffs, shout-along choruses, infectious (that word again) energy, and a healthy sneer at the current state of the world mixed with a riotous enjoyment of a good night out. It is the sound of a band that knows exactly who they are and what they are doing, forged by continuous touring and shaped by that live experience. They come at you thick and fast. There is an old adage that if you can’t say what you want to say in three minutes of a song, then it’s not worth saying, and on TV Dinner, Wine Lipspretty much live by that creed. Songs are Ramoneseque, short and punchy, just as you have got used to one, bam! We are off again with a breathless energy that leaves you wanting more. The only real exception to this is Strip Club DJ – a joyous sleazy funk punk mashup clocking in at the outrageously long 4m 54s.

TV Dinners deals with the world in which we live now and how challenging this can be to navigate bombarded by information that may or not be true, the chase for the next new thing, the challenges of addiction, wellness, affordability and simply trying to get by and thrive in the world that we have created. This is brilliantly encapsulated by one of the stand out tracks Semi Detached Furnished Home that savagely critiques the unaffordability of modern life for many as the simple desire to have somewhere modest to live is actually an unrealistic fantasy.

There are nods throughout TV dinners to some of the originators, like The Ramones, and Leech sounds like a track that’s a love child of The Runaways. Wine Lips may have taken a good swig from some of these early punk and garage bands, but they have updated things from their own world view and produced a thoroughly modern, whip-smart album of chaotically infectious fuzzy punk. The album should come with a word of warning, however – don’t listen to TV Dinner whilst having a TV dinner; things are likely to get messy very quickly.