Review: Sleaford Mods - 'Divide and Exit'

Remember all those years ago when the The Streets first arrived?

The press blurb around ‘Original Pirate Material‘ as something about the future of music being found in the streets, and now it WAS The Streets. Wow.

For a while all that seemed true, like ‘Geezers Need Excitement‘ and ‘Weak Become Heroes‘ were stories about him and her, people in the bus queue, lads in the chippy, girls out for laughs, lifestyles of the not rich and never famous.

Eventually though, despite everyone’s best efforts, it began to feel contrived. Mike Skinner turned out to be from Birmingham rather than Hackney. He started using words like ‘gosh’ in his rhymes. The world he lived in became some kind of unrelenting cliché, tedious lad-ism, music to spill your WKD to. With its demise went any connection to the concrete, all sink estate bets off, all eyes and ears then moving on to the emerging grime scene as the gristle pipeline between urban clique and mainstream culture.

Sleaford Mods frontman – as perverse as applying that term here is – Jason Williamson goes back historically to bands who made ‘real’ music, until his faith in guitars making a point or articulating much got lost somewhere along the way. From Grantham but now resident in slightly hipper Nottingham, on returning there in 2009 after a couple of years in London, he met Andrew Fearn; the newly formed duo immediately worked out a division of labour. This new arrangement allowed the former to focus on proselytizing full time, whilst Fearn worked on what turned out to be pound shop beats, shit hop and crockabilly guitar lines with all the subtlety of a brillo pad.

Their début album as a couple, 2011’s ‘Austerity Dogs‘, was unlike almost anything anyone had produced in years. On it Williamson was the bastard chimera of John Cooper Clarke, Mark E. Smith and Robin Hood, a potty mouthed Robespierre ready to take aim at anything in his polemical way. Such a recipe wasn’t for the WI, but its stark brilliance means that ‘Divide and Exit‘ arrives with something as ridiculous as expectations around it. Those looking for an olive branch however will find it jammed straight into their eye.

In fairness to Williamson and Fearn, this is a democratic spray; we’re all legitimate targets. The deviant krautrock on sweets of ‘Air Conditioning‘ finds the ranter haranguing us through a megaphone; it’s probably no less than we deserve. On ‘Tied Up In Nottz‘ the verbal machine gunning is of drug takers, drug users, wasted little DJs, whilst a two chord bass rumbles like a launderette washing machine. In order to make their point, the SM mantra is frequently interspersed with shop-floor vocabulary, f’s and c’s and words that we all use and hear, but like good little Brits we’re only offended by people who offend. They are of course just words, but in forcing us to confront our own little hypocrisies, the stream of profanity is more threatening to our sense of normality than any weapon.

It would be easy to assume that this is all just hyper extended lager banter, politics for the pissed, but the messages are stark and gruesome, the sheer pointlessness of our choices sketched out on ‘Under The Plastic and The N.C.T.‘ – Williamson spitting out, ‘Three words…Cage. Wheel. Hamster’. He’s not talking about biting the head off one either, although you assume if he could with the royal mutts, he would via the monarchy baiting ‘The Corgi‘. If this doesn’t have Daily Express readers in apoplexy then nothing will, but rather than frothing off at just the Mary Whitehouse massive, on ‘You’re Brave‘ he applies the coup de grace by sorting himself out in the obnoxious, button pressing subject’s shiny toilet, a token of contempt for people who believe superiority is furnished by materialism.

As much as these songs are often laugh out loud funny, they’re also warnings: tablets of drone which are being brought down from the processed cheese mountain, a manifesto which is designed to stop us sleepwalking into the fascist state of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. On its final chapter ‘Tweet Tweet Tweet‘ Williamson is told to ‘Cheer up you f*****g bastard’ by the terminally impervious, but it’s all too late, the grim reaper of taste and compassion has already been and gone, and as conscience free consumers of whatever we’re told to buy, the nightmare from his perspective is that we’re dead but don’t even know it yet. Like the rest of ‘Divide and Exit’ it’s brilliant, stimulating, terrifying, without question the kick in the bollocks music needs.

Coming soon to a hustings near you: Sleaford Mods and their vision of a Britain where the ruling classes have to sit endlessly writing out ‘I Will Not Cheat My Expenses’ a million billion times. Listeners grow a free brain cell with everyone copy. Get them now, before a major label signs them and forces them into street wear, Later Jools and collaborations with The xx.

Get them now, before they’re gone.