54. Puppy - "Pure Evil"

Kurt Cobain used to go on incessantly about Cheap Trick being his favourite all time band. So Puppy have done the only sensible thing you can do with that and that is to splice the bubble-gum pop of the mighty Trick with grunge’s minimal tones. This is album number two for the London upstarts, and they seem in no hurry to abandon their quirky but very quaint take on metal. 

It’s another banquet of slick pop goodness, which they have then gone and sprinkled a bucket load of Metal’s nihilism over. The competing styles should curdle together to create an ill-fitting mess, but in the hands of these consummate musicians, it instead blossoms into a fragrant and quite wonderful mutation. “Pure Evil” is brim full of catchy refrains and polished choruses that are precession engineered to be earworms. But the driving rhythm section keeps it all firmly within Metal’s wheelhouse. Reassuringly different and all the better for that!!