Apparently we're all sick of them now although I didn't get the memo and I'm not sure who counts as we. The Sleafords recent on stage failure to demand freedom for Palestine with due enthusiasm - more likely a reluctance to engage with online nutters - prompted yet another Twitter pile-on wherein persons who've never been within ten miles of a football match denounced the boys as melts and Clash loyalists cleverly pointed out that they're not even mods. My favourite was the opera loving Rupert - as his Twitter bio proclaimed - dismissing our boys as Temu Cockney wankers due to his presumably never having met a working class person who wasn't minicabbing him to the opera house or serving a delicious avocado wrap therein. I suspect this sort of behaviour may be the subject of the title track, The Demise of Planet X, although as usual the Mods tackle the bullshit from an unfamiliar angle, in this case leaving us to puzzle over why the track extrapolates the Magic Roundabout theme. And as usual, it's not quite business as usual and we've moved some way on from the previous album.
We open with The Good Life, which tells us:
I'm not punching down, lads,
I'm gonna style it out,
I'm gonna make out I'm not doing it,
but in reality...
... I am!
I mention this mainly because the sardonic smirk you can actually feel in the ...I am! has enough charge to kickstart a stalled engine and is in itself massively entertaining. I'd even go so far as to say that it is in itself more enjoyable than the entire back catalogues of most other bands, so this probably won't be a conspicuously impartial review.
If we haven't quite moved on from the laptop Suicide variation, we've stepped sideways quite a bit, and the mood isn't quite the familiar raw ambience of piss-chasing a fag end along the full length of the urinal, although there's still a strong element of that. The biggest surprise of all is a quota of uptempo numbers you might even call breezy. The music seems a little more layered, at least closer to something a full band with instruments might come up with, and tracks such as Double Diamond and Don Draper hint at the bluesier end of R&B - talking Groundhogs rather than R. Kelly; Elitist GOAT almost suggests pastel hued Hanna-Barbera teens hopping in the dune buggy and heading out for a day at the beach, even if we all know it's going to be Southend-on-fucking-Sea and will end in rain and bruises; and, to end my admittedly vague comparisons, Bad Santa with its pensive flute and brooding pace is one of the most emotionally powerful things they've done, amounting to the unease of regrets nursed as the hangover clears the next day. It tears your fucking heart out, even with the vocal aggro; maybe because of the vocal aggro.
Listening to Austerity Dogs back in—Jesus Christ, thirteen years ago, it was difficult to imagine these two doing more than a couple of admittedly great albums without turning into something else. It didn't seem there would be much mileage in a band sounding like an argument with a nutcase at a bus-stop with half of the stage presence coming from a bloke who pushes a button then drinks beer for three minutes; but this may be the best thing they've done, at least so far. What doesn't kill them apparently makes them stronger.
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