There’s been a general election in Britain since Sleaford Mods‘ last album ‘Divide & Exit‘ was released to an unsuspecting public in 2014.
The result in itself was shocking enough as the voting public returned a right wing majority government to Parliament for the first time in more than twenty years, but even more insidious was the rise to acceptance of the proto-Nationalist group UKIP who, despite their monotheistic approach to policy and barely disguised racism, won almost four million votes.
Now this instills paranoia amongst the rational, as suddenly the realisation hits that the person sat next to you on the bus, filling up at at the petrol station, or handing you some change at a shop could be one of them, a shy Tory, a shy fascist, or an even shyer nut job, manipulated by a handful of self-serving media barons. The populous have knee-jerked themselves into half a decade of servitude to the ruling classes.
If the Mods’ polemical frontman Jason Williamson could raise much more than a jaded “f*ck off” at the result, it’s not obvious here. ‘Key Markets‘ may be playing to an ever more splintered country, but the duo’s ethos and core messages remain the same; being trust no-one, think for yourself, look after your own and disavow anything that smells like modern culture.
Subtle isn’t a word often used when talking about their machine gunning, archly confrontational music, but between releases Williamson and his fellow middle aged collaborator Andrew Fearn have tinkered with the formula, replacing the familiar crap-hop beats with a simpletons bass, whilst the frontman approximates a disaffected croon on more than one occasion.
‘Divide & Exit’ brought them to the attention of a peer group of similarly marginalised peers, a mob with no rungs to their career ladder and a belly full of cheap lager and other people’s fake, shit eating prosperity. The targets may now have changed from street dealers to Lord Mayors and Deputy Prime Ministers, but the merciless condemnation of Williamson’s spit-flecked prose has not. This is of course dystopia served with the blackest of humour, as the hapless victim of ‘Bronx In a Six‘s arch piss taking (apparently a former employer) is weighed, measured and found wanting in laugh out loud, unprintable non sequiturs.
In a sense this is the pair doing what the say on the tin, but a newly broadened musical horizon delivers songs that allow the material to break free of its previously self-limiting dynamic. On ‘Face To Faces‘ the duo’s ugly garage is snarling genius, whilst ‘Tarantula Deadly Cargo‘s desultory post punk throb is proof of an ability to unlock far more layers than mere hubris by numbers.
Things might be marginally less fundamentalist in the camp, but daytime radio remains firmly off the agenda – a point articulately made with the blunt epithet, “We’re not Cannon and f*cking Ball”, but it’s a tangible measure of the increased confidence that the sludgy funk of ‘Silly Me‘ rumbles at an unfamiliar, almost walking pace, while ‘Rupert Trousers‘ – on a par with any other parable here as ‘Key Market’s best moment – savages demagogues such as Boris Johnson and Blur via sketchy, half realised echoes of early New Order.
Different? Well of course, but these are necessary progressions. Those still devoted to the stream of consciousness meets V-Tech instrumentation of the past still get ‘Giddy On The Ciggies‘, but somehow it feels like an almost backward step, a snapshot there by exception rather than necessity.
To understand how important Sleaford Mods are in 2015 you only have to mine the ridicule that those outside their bubble rain down on them – betting shop anarchists, Nottingham White Attitude, the list goes on – most of it coming from people who are still bought in an Ad Exec’s construct of a life with a future. Williamson and Fearn have been there already however, and return having seen nothing other than wall to wall Morlocks.
Like all deterrents, we shouldn’t need them, but the unpleasant reality is that this horrible noise might be the only thing which can protect us from ourselves.
