The Blow Monkeys
Together/Alone
Like a lot of people, I had very much enjoyed the rich and thoughtfully produced sound of The Blow Monkeys’ 2021 album Journey To You, reminiscent as it was in some ways of their 1986 breakthrough Animal Magic – a record that was playful with its influences and bold in where it took them, and absolutely brimming with enthusiasm and imagination. So when Dr Robert described the band’s new album as being rather more ‘stripped back’, I was mentally prepared – given the unlikelihood that this would turn out to be Limping for a Generation Mark II – for this to be a lesser favourite among their catalogue; after all, not every album can be the one you like the most.
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Together/Alone beings with a feint, however; opening song (and first single) Stranger To Me Now is very much from the Journey To You playbook, an andante-paced successor to the previous album’s opening brace Dust At Her Feet and Time Storm, a track comprised not obviously of verses and choruses but where every part feels equal and equally as considered, equally as engaged as the rest. It’s a stop-starter too (my favourite kind – and there are plenty more elsewhere on Together/Alone), with a hint of Phil Spector in the abundant soundscape as it swells to crescendos and then pauses to recalibrate. The sax-driven outro is straight out of a 1970s movie theme, again an allusion that resurfaces at intervals throughout the album. The band have released some of their best ever singles over the past few years, and this is definitely up there among them.
It’s a point of continuity before Robert redirects The Blow Monkeys off towards new territory – the rest of the album is by turns obvious and eccentric, at times happy in its homage and at others revelling in its audacity. This is, frankly, not The Blow Monkeys like we’ve ever heard them before, and yet quite clearly the work of the same band who went from Staring At the Sea to Feels Like a New Morning. It’s the record the band would have made if they’d matured to this age in the decade that spawned disco and New Wave.
For starters, Robert’s voice is no longer that of an enthusiastic, self-taught twenty-something, keen to be heard but not hidebound by the shackles of conformity. Here he leans into the capabilities of a 62-year-old, his delivery that of a crooning Elvis Presley, at once heartfelt and yet never not twinkling with humour. Track 2, Waking Up Is Hard To Do, sounds (musically, at least) like exactly the kind of thing the BBC would have used as the theme to one of its shows in 1975 or 1977, before Robert drops into the verse and the listener suddenly becomes aware just how much of a departure this is from the previous long-player; you simply couldn’t imagine a song quite so mischievous as this on such an accomplished record, but Together/Alone is going to benefit from the influence of the at times almost jaunty collaborations Robert had recently worked on with Matt Deighton, and this is the first example of that bleeding into the Monkeys’ new sound. But it isn’t slight or superficial; the verse might sound like a tease but once the song takes in its other movements – again, to talk of verses and choruses on this record is to mis-speak about its feel and composition – it leans back into the deceptively light but sincere tone that is the band’s usual position. It is also, like almost everything on this record, incredibly, nay incessantly catchy.
Mind you, even the rude left-turn between the opening two songs cannot quite prepare you for what is to come next.
Rope-A-Dope begins as a faintly Spanish sounding upbeat pop song, with a repeating verse part that comes with vocal variations and additional elements (the arpeggiated guitar is a particular, summery treat, and really quite unlike anything Robert’s played before), which during the third time around adds a rather guttural, heavy sax that suddenly, shockingly, triumphantly and most amusingly – in the best possible way – suddenly jolts into what can only be described as an almost pure heavy metal riff for the chorus (or middle 8, whatever we’re calling this section). You’ve never really heard The Blow Monkeys like this before, and it only goes to prove they could so easily do the one thing Robert has always claimed they never could or will – but perhaps the best part, the nod to the listener that Robert knows exactly what he’s doing and exactly what the reaction will be, is the way the lyric leaps from a weirdly, gently seductive boxing metaphor (“Take a swing at me” never sounded less threatening) to something much more ironic and sinister – assuming that is that you know the famous Muhammed Ali manoeuvre from whence the song gets its title. It’s a gigantic wink to the audience, brilliantly hilarious and utterly poptastic, absolutely guaranteed to bring you to an involuntary grin. On another planet, this would have “Top Ten hit” written all over it.
Not The Only Game In Town follows, even more obviously a Big Single and maybe the album’s signature song; an oddly reflective lyric sits over a very 1970s disco-funk groove complete with familiar musical riffs that just scream to be played on mainstream radio. It’s a quintessential Blow Monkeys mix of a personal but universal sentiment, sung without hysterics and dipping down at the chorus rather than blazing outwards – something Robert so often does, which then draws you in even further – over the top of a groove which will be guaranteed to get heads nodding and toes tapping at future live events. This is the band at their most confident, playing around enough with their basic principle to make everything sound fresh, while still distinctly them.
Don’t Wish Away The Days is not dissimilar, perhaps a touch more obvious and maybe a sliver less essential, and while personally I think I could have done without the backing vocal (others will clearly disagree!), it’s another incredibly catchy song that creeps up on you till you find yourself singing along with it hours or days later. As it starts it feels odd that a track with the same basic groove and tempo as Not the Only Game in Town should follow so hard upon it, but when the next one starts up it soon becomes apparent the reason why.
If the previous four tracks had been mostly reminiscent of what you might expect to hear in a night club circa 1979 or 1980, Side 2 (if you’re listening on vinyl) begins with a wild left turn into almost Eno-esque territory with Cards On The Table, a cool, piano-led ambient track with hushed, sometimes spoken vocals that would previously have sounded more at home on a Bowie album than one by The Blow Monkeys. And yet here they are, inhabiting that space and bringing themselves to it totally; the chord change into the ostensible chorus is one of the most beautiful moments they’ve ever captured on tape.
The thing about this band is that they’ve never striven to be musical innovators in the deliberately iconic way that artists like Bowie or The Beatles were; rather they’ve often behaved more like magpies, trying different sounds on for size and frequently repurposing the ones that fit, blending them with other sounds they’ve picked up along the way such that the result is generally as unique as it is imitative, something brand new by virtue of the players’ own idiosyncrasies. It’s a mark of quite how entertaining a record Together/Alone truly is, that something as chilled and indefinable as Cards on the Table can be followed by a full-on Beach Boys pastiche in Cool Summer Hideaway, possibly the album’s biggest surprise and certainly the biggest departure – however surrounded by other digressions as it is – from the band’s previous form. And yet it is, as always, not a simple copy-and-paste of the original prototype, but instead a reimagining of the Brian Wilson sound till it fits comfortably within the Blow Monkeys model. It’ll put a smile on your face every bit as big as the one Rope-A-Dope gave you; this is pure, unadulterated fun for the sake of the joy of playing - the playing this time almost unrecognisably on what feels like a brand new instrument for Robert, and yet he makes the organ feel like as natural a fit as anything else here, the flutes on track 5 or the evocative grin-inducing backing vocals on track 11.
Fans of the Monkeys’ talky funk stomps will enjoy the slightly more rocky King Of Everything, an ostensibly somewhat more standard Blow Monkeys track which turns down Robert’s vocal in order to emphasise the differences. This doesn’t sound incredibly unlike One More Time or Teardrop Rock from the last long-player, except this time Robert and the band have leaned more into that late 1970s New Wave ambience, with perhaps even a hint of 1990s grunge rock floating around its DNA. This maybe isn’t the album’s most striking moment, but as ever it’s catchier than you expect it to be, and here’s the thing: you could quite easily imagine this to be some lesser band’s most glorious accomplishment. In this context, though, it is once again just a moment of relative calm before another bold departure.
Together/Alone, the record’s title track and thus perhaps its focal point, is a remarkable surefooted tilt into the kind of piano-led big ballad soft rock that you could squint and imagine a younger Billy Joel for instance performing, and I say that as a huge compliment without an iota of irony or criticism; this is confident, heartfelt, broadly accessible and still unmistakably the work of the group that recorded The World Can Wait or Crying for the Moon. It’s an enormous moment in the middle of an album this wide-ranging and unpredictable, the closest thing probably to the opening track and sweeping in its emotional reach. It is, hugely unexpectedly perhaps (and yet somehow maybe not), one of The Blow Monkeys’ crowning achievements, and it’s testament to the four of them that they’re able to lean so hard into unexpected territories in this latter half of the record, yet never once losing that unmistakable rhythm and tone that’s so indelibly them.
After all of that emoting, it’s a lazy-sounding equivalent of the piano intro to Madness’ It Must be Love which brings us into the very different I Just Had To Let It Go, in which Robert turns one of my pet hates – frequent mis-stressing of words so as to fit a lyric to a metre, something which makes the Manic Street Preachers almost unlistenable for me – into a triumph, a drunken, hazy sprawl of thought that’s unfathomably catchy and on another day might have become a national anthem, it’s “Let it go, let it go, let it go” refrain a potential Three Lions-esque riposte to the anti-woke boomer generation. Or that’s how I like to read it anyway. There’s a hint of ska in the feel of this song – appropriately, given the album’s tour of that general period’s various stylings – but oddly, it reminded me also of the kind of sunny reggae that used to be ubiquitous on the summer airwaves, songs that sounded like they were about whiling away the days as effortlessly as possible, yet always felt like they had some deeper context too.
Speaking of pet hates, though, another thing I’ve never been fond of is artists who continually fade their songs out, as if they’d bothered to write the beginnings of them all but couldn’t bring themselves to write the endings – even if they’d have to have some kind of ending if they’re going to play the songs live (I do realise this is a peculiar pet hate). But I’m very happy to report there isn’t a single track that doesn’t come to a proper, authored conclusion here, which not only suggests an ambition to have all of them concert-ready (albeit presumably only some will make it to their live set), but also an extended thoughtfulness in their construction.
Finally (for now, if you’re listening on CD or via download), there’s Buried In The Backyard, which transplants some Ry Cooder-meets-Eddie Cochran guitar onto a blues chord progression, unleashing Robert’s inner Elvis to the fullest extent we’ve ever heard it. And let’s be clear, this is not an impersonation, but an inhabiting of the style and tone of a previous artist borne out of love and familiarity; as with several of the previous tracks – most notably Cool Summer Hideaway I guess – this doesn’t so much sound like the object of its affection, as occupy an adjacent space. The Blow Monkeys have never been afraid of their influences, but equally they’ve never invoked them quite as playfully as here. You can hear exactly where they’re going, but it is never not absolutely them who’s going there.
A few minutes of silence later (or a skip button away, if you prefer), and you arrive at The Blue & Gold, a song about performing and performers and a lightly jaunty but no less contemplative expression of the artists’ history and status, with a spidery guitar signature over yet another accomplished and effortless rhythm section.
Speaking of which, I’ve barely mentioned Mick, Neville or Crispin yet, and you know why; they’re each so effortlessly fundamental a part of the sound, they blend right into the record without drawing explicit attention to themselves, and yet The Blow Monkeys would be so much the poorer for their absence. Crispin is so tight and so in tune with the rhythm of the band, like Tony before him, there’s a lightness to his drumming that allows the songs to float across your consciousness in a way that most bands would be weighed down by instead. Neville’s blowing is by turns cinematic or straight out of some after-midnight club, and even after forty-odd years of playing and performing he still feels like he’s stretching himself, sometimes giving what you anticipate, sometimes delighting you with the entirely unexpected. And Mick’s bass has never, ever sounded as good as it does here; you can almost see him surprising himself with the notes he’s coming up with. You might find yourself concentrating sometimes on Mick alone, and when that happens it’s almost like the record is telling you another story entirely from the one you thought it had been. All three continue to push themselves on without ever losing the charm that has characterised their career to date.
But you know all that, you know these musicians and you know just how tight they are, just how consummate. They’re astonishing.
The Blow Monkeys’ back catalogue is littered with examples of smart developments, each one begging the response “Oh wow, I didn’t know they could do that.” And Together/Alone might be the most pronounced of all. This is absolutely the same band who once produced It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way and who resurrected in the current century to the sound of Devil’s Tavern. But this is also a band that grew up listening to Northern Soul and punk, to disco and even, unbelievably to prog rock. But also, of course, plenty of funk and all blended in the way we’ve come to expect from this second iteration of the band. And it’s an extraordinary record, filled with familiar sounds removed to often strikingly unexpected settings. There are songs here that you would never dream The Blow Monkeys might have written, but that seem such a natural fit now that they’ve recorded them.
Is Together/Alone the band’s best record? No, probably not, if we’re being objective; this is erratic and impulsive in a way that might easily have led to incoherency – and yet, there’s a kind of child-like glee in the way it swings its focus from one song to the next, like a newly-emerging band finding its sound on a debut record, but with all the maturity of a bunch of musicians who’ve spent decades learning one another’s processes and strengths. So if it isn’t The Blow Monkeys’ “best” record, then instead it is their most purely enjoyable. It is really, really entertaining, dynamic and just plain good old-fashioned fun. You could imagine this playing in a youth club in 1979 and the kids having the best time to it, and you couldn’t – but for the familiar characteristics we fans will pick up on – necessarily realise it is all the work of the same four people. (Or mostly four, obviously!)
And it sounds like the work of a band who’ve taken these songs out on the road and honed them into their current shapes by virtue of finessing all the best bits, the things that work – rather than the product of a group who, thanks to lockdowns and a diversity of physical location, have now taken to writing and recording their songs virtually. Because, unquestionably, they know one another’s strengths and habits and capabilities well enough to fall into shape even when they’re not in a room together. In a way this is a bit like a rather more amicable equivalent of The Beatles’ Abbey Road, part “Shall we try this?” and part just enjoying the performance and expression of new songs, in a slightly lower key maybe than the last long-player, but balancing instead towards being the more purely enjoyable experience.
It’s an album that’s going to surprise its way onto fans’ favourites lists.
It’s a point of continuity before Robert redirects The Blow Monkeys off towards new territory – the rest of the album is by turns obvious and eccentric, at times happy in its homage and at others revelling in its audacity. This is, frankly, not The Blow Monkeys like we’ve ever heard them before, and yet quite clearly the work of the same band who went from Staring At the Sea to Feels Like a New Morning. It’s the record the band would have made if they’d matured to this age in the decade that spawned disco and New Wave.
For starters, Robert’s voice is no longer that of an enthusiastic, self-taught twenty-something, keen to be heard but not hidebound by the shackles of conformity. Here he leans into the capabilities of a 62-year-old, his delivery that of a crooning Elvis Presley, at once heartfelt and yet never not twinkling with humour. Track 2, Waking Up Is Hard To Do, sounds (musically, at least) like exactly the kind of thing the BBC would have used as the theme to one of its shows in 1975 or 1977, before Robert drops into the verse and the listener suddenly becomes aware just how much of a departure this is from the previous long-player; you simply couldn’t imagine a song quite so mischievous as this on such an accomplished record, but Together/Alone is going to benefit from the influence of the at times almost jaunty collaborations Robert had recently worked on with Matt Deighton, and this is the first example of that bleeding into the Monkeys’ new sound. But it isn’t slight or superficial; the verse might sound like a tease but once the song takes in its other movements – again, to talk of verses and choruses on this record is to mis-speak about its feel and composition – it leans back into the deceptively light but sincere tone that is the band’s usual position. It is also, like almost everything on this record, incredibly, nay incessantly catchy.
Mind you, even the rude left-turn between the opening two songs cannot quite prepare you for what is to come next.
Rope-A-Dope begins as a faintly Spanish sounding upbeat pop song, with a repeating verse part that comes with vocal variations and additional elements (the arpeggiated guitar is a particular, summery treat, and really quite unlike anything Robert’s played before), which during the third time around adds a rather guttural, heavy sax that suddenly, shockingly, triumphantly and most amusingly – in the best possible way – suddenly jolts into what can only be described as an almost pure heavy metal riff for the chorus (or middle 8, whatever we’re calling this section). You’ve never really heard The Blow Monkeys like this before, and it only goes to prove they could so easily do the one thing Robert has always claimed they never could or will – but perhaps the best part, the nod to the listener that Robert knows exactly what he’s doing and exactly what the reaction will be, is the way the lyric leaps from a weirdly, gently seductive boxing metaphor (“Take a swing at me” never sounded less threatening) to something much more ironic and sinister – assuming that is that you know the famous Muhammed Ali manoeuvre from whence the song gets its title. It’s a gigantic wink to the audience, brilliantly hilarious and utterly poptastic, absolutely guaranteed to bring you to an involuntary grin. On another planet, this would have “Top Ten hit” written all over it.
Not The Only Game In Town follows, even more obviously a Big Single and maybe the album’s signature song; an oddly reflective lyric sits over a very 1970s disco-funk groove complete with familiar musical riffs that just scream to be played on mainstream radio. It’s a quintessential Blow Monkeys mix of a personal but universal sentiment, sung without hysterics and dipping down at the chorus rather than blazing outwards – something Robert so often does, which then draws you in even further – over the top of a groove which will be guaranteed to get heads nodding and toes tapping at future live events. This is the band at their most confident, playing around enough with their basic principle to make everything sound fresh, while still distinctly them.
Don’t Wish Away The Days is not dissimilar, perhaps a touch more obvious and maybe a sliver less essential, and while personally I think I could have done without the backing vocal (others will clearly disagree!), it’s another incredibly catchy song that creeps up on you till you find yourself singing along with it hours or days later. As it starts it feels odd that a track with the same basic groove and tempo as Not the Only Game in Town should follow so hard upon it, but when the next one starts up it soon becomes apparent the reason why.
If the previous four tracks had been mostly reminiscent of what you might expect to hear in a night club circa 1979 or 1980, Side 2 (if you’re listening on vinyl) begins with a wild left turn into almost Eno-esque territory with Cards On The Table, a cool, piano-led ambient track with hushed, sometimes spoken vocals that would previously have sounded more at home on a Bowie album than one by The Blow Monkeys. And yet here they are, inhabiting that space and bringing themselves to it totally; the chord change into the ostensible chorus is one of the most beautiful moments they’ve ever captured on tape.
The thing about this band is that they’ve never striven to be musical innovators in the deliberately iconic way that artists like Bowie or The Beatles were; rather they’ve often behaved more like magpies, trying different sounds on for size and frequently repurposing the ones that fit, blending them with other sounds they’ve picked up along the way such that the result is generally as unique as it is imitative, something brand new by virtue of the players’ own idiosyncrasies. It’s a mark of quite how entertaining a record Together/Alone truly is, that something as chilled and indefinable as Cards on the Table can be followed by a full-on Beach Boys pastiche in Cool Summer Hideaway, possibly the album’s biggest surprise and certainly the biggest departure – however surrounded by other digressions as it is – from the band’s previous form. And yet it is, as always, not a simple copy-and-paste of the original prototype, but instead a reimagining of the Brian Wilson sound till it fits comfortably within the Blow Monkeys model. It’ll put a smile on your face every bit as big as the one Rope-A-Dope gave you; this is pure, unadulterated fun for the sake of the joy of playing - the playing this time almost unrecognisably on what feels like a brand new instrument for Robert, and yet he makes the organ feel like as natural a fit as anything else here, the flutes on track 5 or the evocative grin-inducing backing vocals on track 11.
Fans of the Monkeys’ talky funk stomps will enjoy the slightly more rocky King Of Everything, an ostensibly somewhat more standard Blow Monkeys track which turns down Robert’s vocal in order to emphasise the differences. This doesn’t sound incredibly unlike One More Time or Teardrop Rock from the last long-player, except this time Robert and the band have leaned more into that late 1970s New Wave ambience, with perhaps even a hint of 1990s grunge rock floating around its DNA. This maybe isn’t the album’s most striking moment, but as ever it’s catchier than you expect it to be, and here’s the thing: you could quite easily imagine this to be some lesser band’s most glorious accomplishment. In this context, though, it is once again just a moment of relative calm before another bold departure.
Together/Alone, the record’s title track and thus perhaps its focal point, is a remarkable surefooted tilt into the kind of piano-led big ballad soft rock that you could squint and imagine a younger Billy Joel for instance performing, and I say that as a huge compliment without an iota of irony or criticism; this is confident, heartfelt, broadly accessible and still unmistakably the work of the group that recorded The World Can Wait or Crying for the Moon. It’s an enormous moment in the middle of an album this wide-ranging and unpredictable, the closest thing probably to the opening track and sweeping in its emotional reach. It is, hugely unexpectedly perhaps (and yet somehow maybe not), one of The Blow Monkeys’ crowning achievements, and it’s testament to the four of them that they’re able to lean so hard into unexpected territories in this latter half of the record, yet never once losing that unmistakable rhythm and tone that’s so indelibly them.
After all of that emoting, it’s a lazy-sounding equivalent of the piano intro to Madness’ It Must be Love which brings us into the very different I Just Had To Let It Go, in which Robert turns one of my pet hates – frequent mis-stressing of words so as to fit a lyric to a metre, something which makes the Manic Street Preachers almost unlistenable for me – into a triumph, a drunken, hazy sprawl of thought that’s unfathomably catchy and on another day might have become a national anthem, it’s “Let it go, let it go, let it go” refrain a potential Three Lions-esque riposte to the anti-woke boomer generation. Or that’s how I like to read it anyway. There’s a hint of ska in the feel of this song – appropriately, given the album’s tour of that general period’s various stylings – but oddly, it reminded me also of the kind of sunny reggae that used to be ubiquitous on the summer airwaves, songs that sounded like they were about whiling away the days as effortlessly as possible, yet always felt like they had some deeper context too.
Speaking of pet hates, though, another thing I’ve never been fond of is artists who continually fade their songs out, as if they’d bothered to write the beginnings of them all but couldn’t bring themselves to write the endings – even if they’d have to have some kind of ending if they’re going to play the songs live (I do realise this is a peculiar pet hate). But I’m very happy to report there isn’t a single track that doesn’t come to a proper, authored conclusion here, which not only suggests an ambition to have all of them concert-ready (albeit presumably only some will make it to their live set), but also an extended thoughtfulness in their construction.
Finally (for now, if you’re listening on CD or via download), there’s Buried In The Backyard, which transplants some Ry Cooder-meets-Eddie Cochran guitar onto a blues chord progression, unleashing Robert’s inner Elvis to the fullest extent we’ve ever heard it. And let’s be clear, this is not an impersonation, but an inhabiting of the style and tone of a previous artist borne out of love and familiarity; as with several of the previous tracks – most notably Cool Summer Hideaway I guess – this doesn’t so much sound like the object of its affection, as occupy an adjacent space. The Blow Monkeys have never been afraid of their influences, but equally they’ve never invoked them quite as playfully as here. You can hear exactly where they’re going, but it is never not absolutely them who’s going there.
A few minutes of silence later (or a skip button away, if you prefer), and you arrive at The Blue & Gold, a song about performing and performers and a lightly jaunty but no less contemplative expression of the artists’ history and status, with a spidery guitar signature over yet another accomplished and effortless rhythm section.
Speaking of which, I’ve barely mentioned Mick, Neville or Crispin yet, and you know why; they’re each so effortlessly fundamental a part of the sound, they blend right into the record without drawing explicit attention to themselves, and yet The Blow Monkeys would be so much the poorer for their absence. Crispin is so tight and so in tune with the rhythm of the band, like Tony before him, there’s a lightness to his drumming that allows the songs to float across your consciousness in a way that most bands would be weighed down by instead. Neville’s blowing is by turns cinematic or straight out of some after-midnight club, and even after forty-odd years of playing and performing he still feels like he’s stretching himself, sometimes giving what you anticipate, sometimes delighting you with the entirely unexpected. And Mick’s bass has never, ever sounded as good as it does here; you can almost see him surprising himself with the notes he’s coming up with. You might find yourself concentrating sometimes on Mick alone, and when that happens it’s almost like the record is telling you another story entirely from the one you thought it had been. All three continue to push themselves on without ever losing the charm that has characterised their career to date.
But you know all that, you know these musicians and you know just how tight they are, just how consummate. They’re astonishing.
The Blow Monkeys’ back catalogue is littered with examples of smart developments, each one begging the response “Oh wow, I didn’t know they could do that.” And Together/Alone might be the most pronounced of all. This is absolutely the same band who once produced It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way and who resurrected in the current century to the sound of Devil’s Tavern. But this is also a band that grew up listening to Northern Soul and punk, to disco and even, unbelievably to prog rock. But also, of course, plenty of funk and all blended in the way we’ve come to expect from this second iteration of the band. And it’s an extraordinary record, filled with familiar sounds removed to often strikingly unexpected settings. There are songs here that you would never dream The Blow Monkeys might have written, but that seem such a natural fit now that they’ve recorded them.
Is Together/Alone the band’s best record? No, probably not, if we’re being objective; this is erratic and impulsive in a way that might easily have led to incoherency – and yet, there’s a kind of child-like glee in the way it swings its focus from one song to the next, like a newly-emerging band finding its sound on a debut record, but with all the maturity of a bunch of musicians who’ve spent decades learning one another’s processes and strengths. So if it isn’t The Blow Monkeys’ “best” record, then instead it is their most purely enjoyable. It is really, really entertaining, dynamic and just plain good old-fashioned fun. You could imagine this playing in a youth club in 1979 and the kids having the best time to it, and you couldn’t – but for the familiar characteristics we fans will pick up on – necessarily realise it is all the work of the same four people. (Or mostly four, obviously!)
And it sounds like the work of a band who’ve taken these songs out on the road and honed them into their current shapes by virtue of finessing all the best bits, the things that work – rather than the product of a group who, thanks to lockdowns and a diversity of physical location, have now taken to writing and recording their songs virtually. Because, unquestionably, they know one another’s strengths and habits and capabilities well enough to fall into shape even when they’re not in a room together. In a way this is a bit like a rather more amicable equivalent of The Beatles’ Abbey Road, part “Shall we try this?” and part just enjoying the performance and expression of new songs, in a slightly lower key maybe than the last long-player, but balancing instead towards being the more purely enjoyable experience.
It’s an album that’s going to surprise its way onto fans’ favourites lists.