“I’ve acquired disaster stamina,” spits Sleaford Mods’ frontman Jason William on their new album’s opening title monitor ‘UK Grim’. It’s a decade to the yr that the Nottingham post-punk duo began to interrupt by way of with 2013’s aptly-titled ‘Austerity Canine’ – barking a rough “fuck off” again at David Cameron’s plum-mouth dismantling of what he referred to as ‘Damaged Britain’ with only a field of aggy sounds and a few spoken-word rage; the remainder of the UK music scene, in the meantime, have been attempting to excellent their Alex Turner quiff and swagger.
On their seventh album correct as a duo (twelfth if counting earlier rarities), the Mods follow-up 2021’s universally-acclaimed career-high ‘Spare Ribs’, a file that shrugged on the clusterfuck of COVID Britain. ‘UK Grim’ is a extra aggressive beast, with multi-instrumentalist Andrew Fearn bringing extra color to their sound, persevering with so as to add new depths to his compositions.
‘On The Floor’ is as shut as Mods come to threatening the dancefloor; ‘Smash Every Different Up’ is what West Coast hip-hop appears like when made within the East Midlands; ‘Proper Wing Beast’ is a ska-pop assault on the powers that be. With A-listers like Jane’s Dependancy’s Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro and a playful electro-bounce, ‘So Fashionable’ might have been a Gorillaz quantity if it weren’t such a delightfully snarky takedown of web tradition.
There’s rage aplenty – the junglist fury of ‘Tory Kong’, and D.I.Why’, a center finger to keyboard warrior punk scene copyists – however there’s additionally quite a lot of coronary heart, introspection and subtlety on ‘UK Grim’. On ‘I Claudius’, Williamson whiles away the boredom and impending doom as a toddler at Christmas within the late ‘70s, and ‘Aside From You’ has a craving not usually related to Mods. There’s a simmering dread to ‘Pressure 10 From Navarone’, assisted by Dry Cleansing’s Florence Shaw, an ode to wrestle to conserving your head above the water in these wretched occasions.
You attain the closing sarcastically blissed-out tones of ‘Rhythms Of Class’ and really feel such as you’re cruising by way of Brexit Britain with the highest down, very like Sleaford Mods’ current music movies made by satirical collagist Chilly Warfare Steve; drifting by way of an absurdist fairground of the cartoon privileged the place Nigel Farage bangs his frying pan, whereas Matt Hancock pisses on the aged and Rishi Sunak wheels the money away.
Williamson’s lyrical muse hasn’t modified a lot during the last 10 years. It’s much less of the kitchen-sink melodrama and extra of the dumpster fireplace shithousery; however the extra the gloom turns into normalised, the extra we want a band like Mods to battle again. As Williamson places it on the title monitor, “in England, no one can hear you scream”.
Particulars
- Launch date: March 10, 2023
- File label: Tough Commerce
