Northstar (2004)

 

As usual, I'm late to the show and since recording this debut album, one of them is dead while the other lives on despite having chopped off his own penis during a failed suicide attempt, so I think I'll pretend it's still 2004 for the next couple of paragraphs if that's okay with the rest of you.

Northstar were one of a couple of west-coast acts incorporated in the Wu-Tang's extended family alongside Royal Fam, Shyheim, Killarmy and all of those guys. I first noticed them stood heads above the rest on the Ghost Dog soundtrack, then making similarly outstanding showings on other Wu-related compilations. Suddenly, a mere quarter of a century later, I rushed out and bagged me their debut album and here we are.

More than anything, Northstar have always stood out thanks to Christ Bearer, one of those MCs you could never mistake for anyone else. There's a unique skip or twang to his delivery meaning he sounds like no-one else and you can't help but listen and be drawn in. It's the same deal as you get with Paris. Although rhythms and subjects may differ, it feels similarly urgent, even important. As a bicoastal fusion, this may seem like a bit of a novelty deal, but the blend works beautifully. Where the RZA produces, his beats are cleaner than usual, less cluttered, working well alongside other material, notably the magnificently cinematic Luv Allah from Armand van Helden. We have the sort of lyricism you'd expect from Wu-affiliates over a westerly version of the beats you'd anticipate, so maybe closer to the Alkaholiks than Westside Connection - not much gunplay but no backpacking either, and certainly no filler. It doesn't jump out of the player as an obvious classic album during the first couple of plays but after a week or so I'd rate this one as at least in the same ballpark as Tical or Supreme Clientele. Christ Bearer really seemed to be a unique voice, but Northstar would hold your attention even without his involvement. They should have been huge.

Analog Brothers - Pimp to Eat (2000)

While this one looked a lot like Kool Keith and Ice-T ripping the piss out of the RZA's Bobby Digital, it's proven near impossible to find anything substantial in support of the proposition and even the line about how everyone knows digital blows sounds more like good old fashioned technological fundamentalism. Whoever the target may have been - and I suspect it's more likely suckers as a demographic rather than any specific member of the Wu-Tang Clan - it shares an attitude with much of Kool Keith's back catalogue, namely the suggestion of it being better than everyone else, and knowing itself to be better than everyone else. If this quality is hardly exclusive to Keith in rap terms, he goes one fuck of a lot further than most in proving his point, and so it is with Pimp to Eat.

The Analog Brothers are, or possibly were, mostly lesser known names within Ice-T's Rhyme Syndicate, plus the man himself trading as Ice Oscillator, with er… Keith Korg as the only one who wasn't already in the gang; yet it feels like part of Keith's body of work more than anything, making use of that brooding Diesel Truckers sound - up front beatbox with growling bass and not too much else to clutter the sound; and the full complement of Analog Brothers working with the same lyrical firehose, an uncensored fountain of bewildering surrealism and profanity that's as much challenge as proclamation:

More flow than the average Joe, get off the stamina, Peein' off the top of the Empire State Building, urinate on pedestrians, Walkin' past West 4th Street lesbians, 28th Street flashin' drivin' Dodge dashin' free man, Sport Superman underoos with a six-pack of O'Douls, Move in spark-plugs, come aboard walkin' butt naked with gloves, Throwin feces at celebrities at the Billboard Awards, Make Jerry Springer jump on my balls...

I quote that as a single block so it reads closer to the cumulative effect of listening to this stuff for an hour or so. It approaches information overload, mostly with fucking weird information, that which you may not even want to know - such as that O'Douls is alcohol-free lager, for one example. We're a long way from In da Club, as is probably clear from the cover showing the Brothers picking out their favourite brands of breakfast cereal. In case it isn't obvious from the above, this is pretty much a work of genius, existing at a tangent to the rest of the rap universe at roughly the same angle as the Residents and Flaming Carrot comics to their own respective mediaspheres. We should probably be glad this wasn't a direct potshot taken at anyone specific because I'm not sure many would survive such a blast of concentrated weirdness.

Method Man - Tical (1994)

I had half a mind to write something about Tical 2000: Judgement Day because it's pretty fucking great, then noticed that, magnificent though it certainly is, the first one is unbeatable; so here we are.

As it happens, that first clutch of solo albums in the wake of Enter the Wu-Tang can't really be faulted with RZA at the wheel and the other fifty-six members hanging around in the studio for most of them; but this might be the greatest of the bunch even if it's a close run race. Method Man was never my favourite member of the team, although listening now I'm not sure why and have revised my opinion accordingly. The slurping noises used to put me off but I guess you can get used to anything, and he packs more raw personality into a couple of lines than the majority of microphone botherers manage in a lifetime. Being who I am, I assumed the title was a pseudo-mystical reference to Tikal, the Mayan ruins in Guatemala, but of course Meth being Meth, it's yet another term for a certain quantity of those marijuanas you always hear about*. I've personally never been a fan of the space fags, while Meth clearly loves his weed more than almost anyone else in the universe, despite which this somehow speaks to me, regardless. You've got to admire a man who really knows what he likes this much.

It isn't just the seemingly effortless, often genuinely surreal stream of warped consciousness, but rather it's the marriage of the same to the beats which may even have been RZA's greatest assemblage on a single disc. Sonically speaking, these are moods rather than songs in the traditional sense, radically breaking away from the turntable roots into what may as well be organised noise facilitated by sampler. Aside from a few dusty horn sections or shoplifted vocal hooks, there isn't much here which sounds composed in conventional terms - more like loop the fuck out of whatever's laying around and wait until it sounds like music. So there's that relentless beat, dirty as the underside of a used car with bits of piano bolted to the chassis, or snippets of sound, elements which only become musical with repetition; and a three note bass which sounds like vehicle transmission interfering with your stereo, just a deep boom as though there's something wrong down in the foundations. For something which couldn't have existed without the technology, Tical sounds organic and granular to the point of resembling musique concrète. I'm not sure anything has sounded quite like this record since, even though Tical 2000 took a good shot at it.

*: A man on the internet reckons it's an acronym for taking into consideration all lives, but I'm not convinced.
 

RZA - Bobby Digital in Stereo (1998)

Just to get it out of the way, I vaguely recall the Analog Brothers - featuring Ice-T, Kool Keith and others - as having been some sort of response to the RZA's Bobby Digital, although there doesn't seem to be any obvious reference to anything Wu-Tang on the Analog's Pimp to Eat. In any case, if the Analog name truly flips the bird at the RZA as something lacking - off the top of my head - authenticity or warmth, it seems peculiarly misjudged. Bobby Digital is simply a pun on Robert Diggs yielding a whole set of associations upon which to hang images - the RZA's superhero identity for the duration of the record rather than any sort of technological manifesto set forth as a challenge; and besides, regardless of how it was recorded, the RZA's work seems defiantly organic in composition, making a virtue of all the dirt, the awkward pauses, the mistakes, and the crackle of the old Motown sound back when it was something noisy and dangerous.

The retrofuturism of Bobby Digital in Stereo makes for a strange record, even by Wu standards. It's minimal and understated with the feel of having been recorded on a Playstation in someone's attic, possibly due to the personal, autobiographical, and occasionally nostalgic ambience of the RZA excavating aspects of his own childhood. It's low on hooks, being mostly subdued grooves heard through a haze of either dope or memory, the sort of sound which imprints itself on you during childhood illness, tucked up in bed with a fever. So - if this is making any sense to anyone whatsoever - it's as though the whole record occurs as something not quite seen out of the corner of an eye, or I suppose an ear. Typically it was greeted with a certain quota of indifference when it appeared back in the nineties, which I suppose is inevitable for something so personal. Myself, I'd say it's one of the best things ever to come out of the Wu, right up there with Supreme Clientele, Liquid Swords and so on. I've been listening to it for the last twenty years, and it still does something different every time.

Ghostface Killah - Fishscale (2006)

It's true what they say about how time seems to whizz past as you get older. I still think of this as the new Ghostface record, despite it having come out over a decade ago and being, according to Wikipedia, eight albums past for Mr. Killah. Well, I only just happened across a copy recently, and I've been having a pretty busy time of it over the last decade, so that's my excuse.

For anyone suffering an even greater degree of either senility or general ignorance than myself, Ghostface Killah has long been one of the main reasons you would ever buy a Wu-Tang Clan record - a man named after someone from a martial arts flick and one of the few rappers who can get away with breaking down in James Brown-style tears on a stage without having tiresome wankers question his masculinity. His delivery is engaging and so intensely personal that it's hard not to find yourself affected, drawn into the telling, even given how seriously fucking weird that telling can sometimes be - the rap Mark E. Smith on some days, if that isn't too lazy an analogy.

Fishscale - slang for the absolute Ferrero Rocher of nose candy, you may not be entirely surprised to learn - is unusually focussed, and low on random bursts of surrealism, instead seeming to follow a loosely coherent narrative. Admittedly it's probably not the first time we've encountered said narrative - times being tough, selling the nose candy just to get by, memories of wetting the bed and getting spanked, life on the mean streets and so on and so forth - but it's as valid a tale as it's ever been given that the same terms and conditions still apply for half the people listening to this thing and some of those involved in recording it. Additionally, it's worth remembering that Ghostface is more or less incapable of delivering a prosaic line and could make a laundry list sound like a matter of life and death.

It probably helps that Fishscale is musically similar to Supreme Clientele - his previous masterpiece - being a rough and raw summation of old soul moves which really hit the point home, giving a rich and emotionally potent support to the story as it unfolds; and yes, soul music - because we seem to have forgotten how that stuff was once as raw and painful as fuck, a very different, significantly more powerful beast than the slick and shiny suited croon-wank it became in the eighties. Ghostface clearly hasn't forgotten, and here we get something warm with bad lighting, broken piano and horn sections rescued from crumbling old eight tracks and scratchy discs cut in dirt cheap studios. It has the feel of a live band without sounding anything like one, definitely something organic, even when it obviously isn't - the tape recording of a ping-pong match looped to embellish the beat on Dogs of War, for example; the terrifying drone of Clipse of Doom; and Jellyfish which weirdly reminds me of Stereolab. At least on this album, Ghostface Killah, excels at giving you something entirely unlike whatever you've already heard which nevertheless feels as fundamentally rooted in the very heart of its culture as anything which ever happened in a Bronx basketball court in the seventies. It should also be kept in mind that this review is probably a verbose load of old wank, so it would be easier all round if you just listened to the album.

DJ Squeeky presents Tom Skeemask - 2 Wild for the World (1998)

Just the other day I happened to slip upon a patch of oil left over and not yet cleared up after stripping down and cleaning my numerous hand guns and assault rifles, and falling against the computer I found myself accidentally online and unintentionally logged on to a bulletin board dedicated to the children's television show Doctor Who. Naturally I made attempts to sign out but, already confused, I found that I had instead been drawn into a section of the forum dedicated to music, and specifically to a thread purportedly set up for fans of hip hop and rap, although it would be fairer to describe it as a thread for forum members owning one or two rap albums. It took only seconds to locate the first claim of there having been no decent rap music recorded since the first Wu-Tang Clan album, because it's all that Puff Daddy and commercial rap like Lil' Wayne, and Public Enemy were great, and in fact It Takes A Nation of Millions is probably the best rap album ever - and yes, I know I'm going out on a limb with such a bold, unpopular statement - and we don't like that commercial rap because we only like the underground stuff which you probably won't have heard of because it's underground and not commercial like Puff Daddy and that bass music, whatever it's called; the Fugees were good too, and that Will Smith is a great entertainer...

Luckily I had already returned my firearms to the rack in Junior's room, because I really, really felt like emptying a clip into the fuckin' screen, lemme tell ya...

This was about rap for people who don't actually like rap - rap deemed more adventurous and underground than the Puff Daddy commercial rap because it appeals to fans of Radiohead and really interesting groups of that sort, because it's progressive and exciting and not actually much like rap, which is all too commercial and made by angry black men talking about guns and money and saying some really sexist stuff too, like that so-called Fat Joe. Alex Petridis in the Guradian pointed out that Fat Joe has a song called Shit is Real which just goes to show what a stupid, uneducated fellow he is. Shit is Real - I mean come on, it's hardly William Blake now is it snurf snurf...

So that was how I came to experience a sudden and overpowering need to cleanse my soul with some real rap, as distinguished by its copious swearing, threatening behaviour, actual beats, and fixation on real shit of flavours rarely experienced by folks with fucking cLOUDDEAD records; and as is appreciated by people who listen to rap. This will undoubtedly resemble sneering, but fuck it - if you don't like rap just go ahead and say it, but don't claim otherwise whilst referencing some shit that came out a quarter of a century ago as representative of the last time it was good enough for you to bother listening. Piss off and take your friggin' Buck 65 twelves with you back to fuckin' Starbucks.

Tom Skeemask is, for what it may be worth, the real deal. He says stuff you really might not want to hear, but which might do you good to hear; and whilst he may not be the greatest rapper in the world, he really ain't that bad, and if there's any suggestion that maybe he doesn't mean it, or that he's just saying this stuff so as to appear like some commercial rap big shot - you know, like that Puff Daddy, well - he's probably not that hard to track down, so please feel free to go ahead and tell him to his face. It's violent and territorial because sometimes life is violent and shitty and unhappy, and territory is the only thing some people have at the lower end of the economy.

This is southern rap - hard words spat out at machine gun tempo and a hot, slow Memphis vibe timed to the pace of life in the hotter states, places in which the weather obliges you to move around real slow for the best part of the day. It's closer in spirit to Eightball & MJG than any Hypnotize Minds thing - electric piano, lush guitar licks, and a bass so deep you can only hear it in cars, it being designed to scare the shit out of whoever you happen to drive past at snail's pace with your window down. DJ Squeeky lays down the tracks and Tom Skeemask tells it like it is, and there isn't much more to say about it because it speaks for itself, what with being the real thing and all.

I feel better now.

Thank you, Tom Skeemask.

Non-Phixion - The Future is Now (2002)

There's never really been a need for the white rap version of NWA  because - aside from the NWA we had working just fine - if you're grading your rap by skin tone, then you're almost certainly missing a huge chunk of the point regardless of what may be claimed by idiots like Lauryn Hill or that Made Men guy who owned The Source magazine, whatever the fuck his name was; but, if you really, really, really insist, then it was probably Non-Phixion.

As with NWA, Non-Phixion only made two proper albums, and this was the first of them; and they were notable for just about every single track involving any combination of these four people - Ill Bill, Sabac Red, Goretex, and DJ Eclipse - emerging from that period being more or less fucking perfect. Bringing in Sabac Red's I Have A Dream and Ill Bill's Anatomy of A School Shooting and that's four spots in the hip-hop top ten all time greats just from this one group alone - the other two being Rock Stars from this album and Caught Between Worlds from The Green if anyone cares, and keeping in mind that there's no such thing as a hip-hop top ten all time greats, or at least not one that stays the same for longer than a couple of hours.

Where was I?

The Green had a bit of a mixtape feel to it, but this one was solid as fuck - hard gritty beats, that skipping exhaust-choked cinematic New York groove that Wu-Tang never really got right quite so often as they should have done, but here on point from beginning to end; and the pump of bass, and some fairly low-key sample, and DJ Eclipse scratching away like nobody's business. It's the simplest, most basic sound in the world, no more than a variation on the stuff done in the parks and baseball courts before anyone had even heard of this sort of thing, but somehow it's done with such conviction on this album - thanks to Necro, Pete Rock, Large Professor, and others - that even in 2002 it managed to sound like something new. Obviously it wasn't, but Non-Phixion always seemed like a breed apart from most of their peers, which was probably the lyrical melange keeping everything far too lively for reduction to being just one thing. This was street-level underground conscious rap which spent far too much time watching Italian splatter movies and had no intention of apologising for its heavy pornography habit. It was a whole mess of contradictions all jammed together and forced to carry such weight that it makes you apologise for being a dick, for not getting it first time. It was supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, or to make you laugh, or to make you go out and rob a bank. Non-Phixion were one of the few groups who could switch from capitalism and world politics to black helicopters, L. Ron Hubbard, and Area 51 without sounding like complete loonies.

I don't know what happened after The Green, and La Coka Nostra just sounded like some sort of Insane Clown Posse version of Non-Phixion to me, even without the off-putting involvement of that Cypress Hill bloke. Maybe I've just heard the wrong stuff.

What matters is that this existed and still blows my nuts off each time I slap it on, figuratively speaking; but of course you already knew that, even if only just from Rock Stars which is, as you should be aware, just about the phattest shit that's ever existed in the history of phat shit, because if you ain't still bumpin' Rock Stars at least once a week, then what the hell is wrong with your ass and how do you justify your existence?

Ugh.

Get away from me.

Sleaford Mods - Retweeted (2014)

When I first heard Mr. Jolly Fucker by Sleaford Mods I felt compelled to seek out more, so startled was I by the sound - so basic, so exciting, and so face-punchingly angry. Within a couple of hours of poking around on YouTube, I knew I needed to get my hands on every last squeak and fart ever recorded by this group. It was therefore a bit disappointing to realise they - or he if you insist - had already pooped out at least four albums of material that I would probably never get to hear, despite this being the age of everything that ever existed becoming available once again. I used to be so good at this sort of thing, knowing what was out there and what was what, as a stack of early Foetus singles and Unkommuniti tapes are my witness.

Retweeted, collecting the best of that early stuff, was therefore well worth the wait, and well worth the additional wait of my having to buy an amplifier and record player so I could play the thing.

I can sort of see why the band - now that there's definitely two of them - seem to have drawn a line between this - mostly Jason Williamson and others - and Austerity Dogs onwards with Andrew Fearne pushing the buttons. It's hard to tell quite what the difference is, but there definitely is one. I never quite got those Wu-Tang references mixed up with all the other efforts of everyone scrabbling to describe the band - Crass meets John Cooper Clarke, Roy Castle fronting the Fall, Swans covering Splodgenessabounds... but anyway, I can see it here, or at least I can see Sleaford Mods as more or less an English Mobb Deep - as has been mentioned in some interview or other. Even without the occasional NWA reference or Illmatic sample, it's that same sensation of taking a piss in an alley behind the kebab shop and it's raining, and you're stood in a puddle with shit shoes and wet feet...

Where the hell was I?

Much of Retweeted sounds even angrier than the recent material, at least to me, although it could be the punk rock samples, loops from various Pistols and Alternative TV records evoking certain associations with punch-ups and a surfeit of crap lager. The slightly annoying thing is that I realise I was trying to do this myself a few years ago, right down to looping Pretty Vacant in an attempt to spin my own yappy yarns of minimum wage misery with some sort of local underpinning; but not too annoying, given that the stuff on this record does it about twenty times better than I ever managed, and without trying quite so hard; and in case it needs stating, the lyrics were brilliant even back then, terrible, hilarious, and strong enough to strip the paint off most walls. The more I listen to Sleaford Mods, the more I notice how bad so much music has been for at least the last couple of decades. I suppose, if you want to get snippy, this is just some fat old codger praising music which kindly references Ronnie Biggs' Biggest Blow and other crap left laying around by my generation, and I should probably be listening to Skrillex or Neutral Milk Hotel or fucking Ha Ha Tonka - which really is the name of some band; but bollocks - simply being an old cunt with a long memory doesn't necessarily render one's experience any less valid or even vital than that of a twenty-year old told to wait another two decades before forming an opinion. So maybe this is old people's music because teenagers spend their money on ringtones of autotuned Pokémon themes rather than Sleaford Mods, but so what, and does it really matter?

Jason Williamson's sleeve notes state that he isn't particularly proud of these old tracks, which I can sort of understand, although he probably should be, not least once you consider the competition. Retweeted remains a genuine racket, a real joyful noise, and it does what music was always supposed to do, and which not much of it has been doing for a while.

Three-6-Mafia - Mystic Stylez (1995)

Some years ago I happened upon a day time chat show in which one of those Jesusy evangelical backmasking obsessives confronted the lead singer of Venom - or possibly some other Venom personage.

'You record backwards subliminal messages on your records in order to warp young minds and turn them to Satan,' he blustered, apparently believing he'd just exposed the truth of a major conspiracy.

'Yes,' the Venom bloke agreed helpfully. 'Yes, we do!'

Three-6-Mafia seem to be coming from that same place, or at least they were in 1995, which I notice is now, rather terrifyingly, as long ago as was Jailhouse Rock when I myself first started listening to music. Anyway, whatever terrible claim you may have heard of that there rapper's music, Three-6-Mafia do that shit with brass knobs on and a big fuckin' smile on their faces; or, they used to. I'm not sure quite what they're up to these days as I drifted away when Gangsta Boo jumped the increasingly blingy ship. What recent stuff I've heard has a bit more of a club vibe, all squeaky synths, crunk juice and riding spinners. It's okay in so much as it does it's job, but I much prefer their earlier, more conspicuously evil incarnation.

Mystic Stylez was recorded back when the cost of those ice-grill vampire fangs imposed a fairly low budget on the recording of this, their first and best album. At least that's how it appears - gas-powered samplers creaking away, cracked casings, masking tape, distorted effects through what sounds like a vintage spring line reverb, and an album that may originally have been issued as a series of 78s, judging by the sound quality. It's the same basic griminess which is always attributed to the Wu-Tang Clan, but Three-6-Mafia did it better, underpinning the whole with a bass so deep that most of the time it's a feeling rather than notes; and compositionally it's nothing like the music of those Staten Island kung fu obsessives. Agonisingly slow beats invoke the more pants-wettingly terrifying John Carpenter soundtracks, contrasting with the staccato flow of triple time galloping raps wherein Juicy J and the gang do their best to scare the living shit out of you; and they succeed with a vertigo inducing sound akin to being knifed through a cough syrup haze. The science, so to speak, may not be lyrical by the terms of J-Live or related worthies, but it's exactly as lyrical as it needs to be.

Just to bang on about this one for the umpteenth time, the most misunderstood aspect of this kind of rap is not so much that it encourages or glorifies violence, that it's sexist or homophobic, or that it's lacking in redemptive qualities; the most misunderstood aspect is that it necessarily requires either the approval or endorsement of anyone still getting misty eyed over the era of De La Soul and socially responsible messages heard over a coffee shop tannoy system. This reduces to the notion that rap by definition must do only one thing, subject to the approval of people who don't actually like much rap when it comes down to it. Three-6-Mafia were always more Eazy E than anything else, with that same amoral glee taken in whatever it is that will piss you off the most; and because not only are these records done for themselves, for their friends, and for anyone else who wants to hear them - as opposed to anthems of moral guidance for the greater good of humanity - but because, sometimes smash it up is as legitimate an argument as anything with more syllables and a friendlier smile. So not only do they commit all the supposed cardinal sins as defined by rap's most vocal critics, but they added a few of their own on this album, Venom-style showbiz Satanism and cannibalism to name but two. In any other genre, this may have come across as faintly ridiculous, but here it not only works, but it's fucking chilling - an hour or so of cold funky sweats and adrenaline rushes which place the listener directly at the centre of the robbery, the street shooting, and the raw terror; and if you really need it to, yes - at least some of this can be considered a metaphor for the horror film of daily existence in one of the more frequently shat upon demographics.

As I've almost certainly said elsewhere, Mystic Stylez is why I find it difficult to take all those power electronics clowns seriously. It's not so much that Three-6-Mafia necessarily ever did any of the stuff described here for real, but they're almost certainly closer to some of it than William Bennett or even Michael Gira ever were, and they're not stood in an art gallery handing out tastefully shocking limited edition prints of it. Mystic Stylez sounds like no other album ever recorded, even in the context of the Three-6-Mafia's own catalogue. It's probably one of the darkest records ever made, and possibly one of the finest; and Break Da Law is still the greatest inducement to the dispensation of good old fashioned pissed-off get back since Straight Outta Compton.

Sleaford Mods - Austerity Dogs (2013)

It seems that in certain quarters there is a generally held view of Sleaford Mods as being the next big thing, perhaps suggested by a recent write-up in Mojo or some magazine of that sort. This seems unusual in so much as somehow I've heard of them prior to the predicted enmassivisation, and that they're fucking great, in contrast to the general trend of the last few hundred next big things being mostly toss, Neutral Milk Hotel for example - Neutral Toss Hotel would have been more like it...

Already the usual suspects are queueing up to forge the definitive summary of the Sleaford Mods sound resembling a fusion of John Cooper-Clarke and the Wu-Tang Clan, which it doesn't; or The Fall, which fails to get any closer, as is usually true of almost every band ever described as sounding like The Fall; or they're punk hop, whatever the fuck that's supposed to be. I'm not sure if anyone has yet suggested Suicide fronted by Pitman on the grounds of blue-collar rude words spat out in an East Midlands accent; or Nocturnal Emissions circa Songs of Love and Revolution mashed up with Skinnyman; or Swans covering Splodgenessabounds because it's an amusing image and not much worse than any other description, but if not, you can have those for free.

Sleaford Mods build songs up from raw loops of what sound like someone's rehearsal tapes captured on a mono-portable cassette player in 1978, and a sort of Tourette's attack of lyrics that really capture the feel of turning up for agency work at a Parcel Force depot at 6AM on a freezing Monday morning only to be told the failed Footballer's Wife from said agency was too busy painting her nails to send your papers through to the gate; and so you're screwed once again. Specifically, Austerity Dogs sounds to me exactly like life in England just before I escaped, at least life for the belching majority who somehow failed to end up in their dream jobs once they left school. Sleaford Mods are not only the opposite of  anything you will ever see on The X-Factor, one voice of the underwaged and supposedly unemployable silent masses against which the British Government has recently declared out and out war, but they're one of those once in a lifetime bands - depending on your definition of what constitutes a band - of such fierce and comic honesty that almost anything stood next to them will inevitably end up seeming affected, ridiculous, and divorced from reality.

The only phone on the road is chlamydia-ridden phlegm stained,
where the fuckers sell processed peas as weed.
It's cold when I look out my window.
Another local pub burned down to the ground.
I hated those fucking Motown nights anyway.
It's Jive Bunny meets Lucy fucking Pinder...
...on ice!

To be honest, Austerity Dogs is so good as to make all efforts to write about it completely pointless - simple, powerful music and brilliant words, and I just can't stop listening to the fucker. As with the cold leftovers of last night's kebab hastily consumed on the way to work in the hope of staving off a hangover, it may not be pretty but it's undeniably nourishing.

Available from Norman Records and probably some other places.