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Sydney Minsky Sargeant’s debut solo album is a very pronounced left turn from Working Men’s Club’s ecstatic, industrial synth pop.
It just looked like the best gig they’d ever played.
When Working Men’s Club took to the stage at Glastonbury in 2023 what happened next was message-your-mates stuff.
Locked into performance at a level rarely met on a Saturday afternoon at Worthy Farm, or anywhere, the quartet absolutely killed it, to the extent that by the end you were left with wondering just what would be next.
Next? Well, Working Men’s Club are working on a new album – their third, to succeed 2022’s Fear Fear – but in the meantime their creative leader Sydney Minsky Sargeant has taken a break to record a solo effort which has, if you’ve been familiar with the band’s story, felt inevitable since they emerged at the back end of the old decade.
Lunga is a very pronounced left turn from Working Men’s Club’s ecstatic, industrial synth pop.
Sydney Minsky Sargeant grew up in Todmorden, a Pennine town made famous more recently by much loved venue The Golden Lion (at which he still puts on regular club nights), but a place where things usually happen at a glacial pace, if at all.
As touring, collaborating and writing all began to mesh into one, a need emerged to step back and commit to tape some of the songs he’d been writing which were very obviously from a different head space.
Co-producing along with long-time collaborator Alex Greaves and playing most of the instruments, the firebreak this material provides against his other work is a conscious one.
Subsequently, its purpose has been underlined by Sydney Minsky Sargeant revealing that the album’s dynamic is, ‘another way of saying we are all one and the same deep down and that we should try to remember that a little more. In a world that has never felt so scary and polarised, I just hope this album connects with people’.
The opening part at least brings with it some intimacy, For Your Hand a finger picked acoustic token of longing that looks back to the folk rock classicists, whilst the equally pastoral shades of I Don’t Wanna glide conspiratorially by with: “Confide in me / I’ll put down everyone / I’ll put down everything / If loving this is wrong then I don’t wanna be right.”
It’s a hazy mood, one which persists through the reflective, gently orchestrated Lisboa, but the many posthumous lovers of Nick Drake will delight in the gently picked Long Roads, a sublime reappraisal of an artist that took away an older Britain on his death and with that, its key.
If that had no hope of lasting, then a full stop is called by the near eight-minute ambient drone Lunga (Interlude), whilst the psychedelic dream pop of A Million Flowers could be an alternative universe Damon Albarn if he’d gone to school in Halifax.
There’s a sense of greater drama too in Chicken Wire. It’s Lunga’s wild centre, darkening skies and harder tones giving way to a totally unexpected country breakdown that threatens to give off so much energy as to engulf everything around it.
It’s perhaps fitting that something written as a way of expressing things that can’t be said in the blur of what passes for Sydney Minsky Sargeant normal life ends with New Day, the notion of closure and grabbing strands of hope summed up on the opening line’s determination to start, ‘Kicking back the old thoughts for good’.
It looked like the best gig that he’d ever played, but there’s always a morning after, and Lunga is the sound of catching that next wave and letting it take you wherever it wants.
