Apocalypse Wow! Welcome to your soundtrack to the end of world.
Sleaford Mods’ peerless minimalist aggro-electro is natural underground music which has threatened to become zeitgeist-defining for some time now. Now frontman Jason Williamson and backman Andrew Fearns’ vision of underclass exploitation, hope-killing austerity, liberal hypocrisy, grim frustration, tyre-slashing satire, and carnivalesque obscenity feels very on the money indeed, with war and dictatorships now entering their lyrical mix. All the worst people have seized their opportunity and taken charge. Williamson’s take is that the apocalypse has already happened and we’re in smoking wasteland picking through the rubble.
Which all sounds terribly depressing, and kind of is, but this horror show also is fun, filthy and frequently hilarious.
In Flood the Zone we have MAGA “on the beer and its made a phone call” revelling the court of “Henry VIII in the Oval.” The title track warps the Magic Roundabout theme tune as it rakes over a country in love with a dead past, half-cut flag-wavers dancing and rolling around among the buried: “Bastards sleep in noisy graves/Where the maggots think: ‘fuck that’.”
But there’s no hand-wringing calls for togetherness and communal sing-songs, this is pitiless, death-staring Gonzo-punk, where everyone is culpable. Yes, including well-meaning hand-wringing bourgeois grinners clinging to The Good Life (featuring a deranged guest spot by a screaming, raging Gwendoline Christie: “I’m Evel Knievel’s stunt cyclist in a nowhere f*cking land”) and those nice young liberals with social media ‘platforms’ wanting to use hellscape conflicts for their own pious posturing ( “It’s all about me, the Elitist G.O.A.T.”).
Certainly Williamson doesn’t let himself off the hook either, retreating in exasperation into his online shopping world on the final track, The Unwrap, “Even when you beat them streets, even if you get somewhere, no-one likes you, no-one cares/I just buy stuff now.”
A pulsating record, like a Looney Tunes cartoon directed by Stanley Kubrick, or just the bit where Wile E Coyote blows his own face off. Best band in the country. Or whatever’s left of it.
The Demise of Planet X is out now on Rough Trade
