My first impressions of this album were mixed. There's an in-your-face element in the vocals, particularly the spoken-word sections, which did, and does, take me out of my comfort zone. They're taunting, goading, challenging, unsettling, and it was not for their sake - at first - that I listened to it again.
The hook that caught me was the music. It's tight, creative, understated and confident - in other words, Good Rock Music. The instrumentation is sparse but eloquent, the composition confident, and the musicianship top-flight -the sort that possesses that seamless and invisible kind of uncluttered economy - as good music should - where you hear the music, not the musicians. It's only afterwards that you think to yourself, hey, this is hot stuff.
There were three or four songs which stood out as attractive on first introduction, and seemed worth getting to know better. Now, after many listens, each bringing out something new to like about the album, I'm even more comfortable with the emotional investment I made, and impressed with the fact that this is a really good album. It's an unusual album - original and brave. There are more than three or four good songs on it. I'm not going to go through them individually - partly because the ones I like most keep changing. The whole thing is really clever, rich with inventiveness and class - in other words, great music.
The spoken-word element is still not my favourite thing about it, but it only applies to two sections on the album which, importantly, are integral to the whole, and I'm comfortable with them now as valid aspects of the complete work. Musically, it's rock music. I mean, surely that doesn't need further description. I hate musical labels, anyway, but if you insist, it's a bit jangly and funky and modern, a bit punky and demented, a bit funny and cute, a bit rocky and tough, a bit dreamy and cruisy, and if that helps you, then good luck to you. If you like rock music, you'll like it; it's got some great guitar, some excellently original melodies, brilliant harmonic - and coolly dissonant - themes and phrases, and lots of solid, clean rhythms. The bass and drums are worth hearing just for themselves. And - always a good sign - it sounds better the louder you play it. So listen to it and make up your own mind.
Lyrically, labels are equally misleading. The songs track a path from point to point across the distressing but just-as-often-amusing social landscape of this peculiar world we're living in, yet amidst all the darkness I keep coming up for air with a sense of positivity and hope, of empowerment and determination. Anger is an energy. It's an album about alienation, corporate fascism, social dysfunction, but … more than that, the undercurrent is there, rarely stated but never absent, driving with all the subtlety of a three-chord riff through a Fender twin amp, like any true work of art from the past fifty years, however dystopian - the assertion of the supremacy in all our strivings, personal and political, of Love.
Sorry, Old Hippy mode sort of kicked in there. This is more than just a good album. You should listen to it.
(Reviewed by Paul Foley)