Album Review: Sleaford Mods – English Tapas


English Tapas



Andrew Fearn and Jason Williamson could hardly be criticised for strutting around with t-shirts emblazoned with the legend “we f***ing told you so” on the front.

Dismissed by many a sneering hipster as Rad Dads playing crap hop whilst they gradually rose to an anti-fame notoriety, their vitriolic twenty first century punk has proven far more resilient than many predicted.

Shrugging off the Millennial slaggings, the pair have stood by whilst much of the coded warnings in their profane bon mots – the rise of the far right as false standard bearers for much of the working class, our obsession with mapping the absurdly trivial on social media, a chronic inability for self-rationalisation – came true like Nostradamus-esque ducks in a row. Rarely standing still, they’ve also been clever enough to understand that Williamson’s machine gun ranting would eventually lose its shock value in an era when almost anything to do with culture is so rapidly assimilated by the host.

Signs of this adaptation were evident on English Tapas’ predecessor Key Markets, but whilst the duo are still not in any conventional way a band, this is them at their most musical yet, although everything remains relative. More to emphasise the difference than as a concession, Williamson occasionally sings, his turn on closer I Feel So Wrong weary but far away from the awkward flab of an eight pint karaoke uncle.

Things seem less radically altered on opener Army Nights, over which he raves at a familiar 100 riles an hour the tale of a moral-free personal trainer whose libido gets satisfied in a mobile home shag pad by the sea. Accompanied by a bassline that sounds like it’s about to punch someone’s lights out and one of Fearn’s muddy, amphetamine hi-hats, the impression is still of a songwriter wanting to get it all out before the audience walks away in confusion, a manifesto drawn up with dog ends on a pub floor.

The arch characterisations though are as filthy and comedic as ever, none less so than that of Brexit architect Boris Johnson on Mop Top : “I’m sick of what I tell you for note/I’m saying f***ing sorry to the catalogue vote/Having to be a bit naff and inclined/When all I really wanted was to batter and blind”.

English Tapas isn’t different because it’s the first album the pair have produced using a studio, or that it’s the first Sleaford Mods album to come out on a prominent label (Rough Trade). If anything the difference is that it carries with it a harder, serrated edge, a concrete misanthropy built, its creators say, on the minimalism of grime. Newcomers may scoff: this is after all two middle aged white men from the mean streets of Grantham, but the movement’s very idiosyncrasies – windscreen jarring low end, spectral cut ups and interview room delivery – are present for all to hear on Cuddly, with its transfixation on false icons such as rich baby footballers, or Snout, its awkward, rotating sample helping to convince us less is less.

It isn’t easy listening of course, but with seemingly everything in a bizarre retrograde orbit the medicine is a choking necessity, the words like awkward splinters of thought digging under the listener’s skin. Messy Anywhere is at least superficially clear, a disconsolate blast at hedonism exercised by the “so dead in the head”, whilst Drayton Manored’s two note Bontempi peeps are as surreally close to relief as any other moment here.

This new austerity can have you wondering what they came for – bleakness or obliqueness. Being British has always been about fighting enemies that we can see, being a yardstick for courage in some sort of utter waste of lives or another. Never is this irony more emphatically nailed than on BHS, the chain of department stores who catered for those on pensions only to find that the sleazy oligarch who’d taken them over was attempting to rob the staff of theirs. Picked over like carrion, the fates of both the unfortunate employees and the country as a whole are woven together deftly, the patter of Fearn’s beats oddly tidy and sanguine.



Now no longer so prophetic, Sleaford Mods are cheerful purveyors of ugly realities like this, making the message as unpalatable as possible, peeling back our earlids and forcing us to listen. Products of a country in which the identity politics they once spoofed are now motorised like some vast social experiment, English Tapas refuses to accept the compromises which define us, its perpetrators it seems not even getting started on us all yet.

Like a lovebite, it’s a taste of deformity that we all need.

(Andy Peterson)


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