The video for this album’s first track, Double Trouble, has a bespectacled, cardiganed John Lydon raving about domestic disrepair: “Wot, you fucking nagging again? The toilet’s fucking broken again? I repaired that!” His disgust, as he squares up to the drudgery of middle-aged married life, is febrile. If this isn’t quite what he fought the punk wars for – even more disconcertingly, the electro-country The One is a love song to his wife – it’s still a rousing introduction to PiL’s 10th album.
And the album’s pleasures are many: the hypnotic leanness of the rhythm section on the eight-minute dub groove Big Blue Sky, Lu Edmonds’s shimmering guitar on Whole Life Time and Lydon’s undimmed biliousness as he rails against “the greatest pornographic country in the world” on staccato post-punk rant Bettie Page, and spatters the krautrockish Shoom with enraged, scattergun expletives (“Botox? You’re bollocks! Fuck off!”). Having said that, it’s noticeably similar to 2012’s This Is PiL – and for a truly engaged evisceration of the establishment, you’d currently do better with Sleaford Mods.
