In theory at least, Sleaford Mods’ moment should already have passed. Fairly or not, artists with a wilfully stark musical blueprint tend to be subject to diminishing returns pretty quickly, and few artists around at the moment have as stark a sound as Sleaford Mods. Virtually everyone must have the general idea by now. English Tapas, their ninth album, certainly tweaks the design here and there. There are bursts of dubby echo on Messy Anywhere, backwards tapes and ghostly ambience on Time Sounds and a dancehallesque slant to the beat of Cuddly, while frontman Jason Williamson displays a willingness to sing – in a vibrato-heavy, John Lydonesque keen – far more often than before, matched by the appearance of melodies, something in fairly short supply on previous Sleaford Mods albums. But no one is likely to hear English Tapas and be baffled as to who it’s by: it’s still centred around simple basslines atop pummeling rhythm tracks and Williamson’s furious, expletive-laden bark.
In fact, this deliberately limited sonic palette might be the very thing that makes the duo still seem vital, long after the novelty should have worn off. Without wishing to diminish the effort that goes into making their albums, they clearly work relatively quickly; they’re also prolific. This keeps their music mobile, responsive and topical, a throwback to that brief period in the early 80s – before two year album-tour cycles introduced a degree of sclerosis into rock and pop – when certain songs in the charts appeared to comment on the news as it happened: Stand Down Margaret, Ghost Town, Between the Wars. So English Tapas prickles with a different set of anxieties than, say, 2014’s Divide and Exit, or its 2015 successor, Key Markets. It takes a few tracks for the topic of Brexit to appear – initially, the album seems more concerned with Williamson’s understandably complex response to the band’s commercial success and high media profile – but when it does, it provokes a bracingly volcanic torrent of fury. “Like scared kids, like scared kids, because that’s all you are, rubbing up to the crown and the flag and the notion of who we are – fuck off,” he snaps on Snout.
From that point on, the topic haunts the album, cropping up again and again, from Dull’s evisceration of Ringo Starr to BHS’s depiction of the collapsed department store chain as a metaphor for the decline of the country as a whole, while “vultures monitor and pick at us”. Every time it appears, it carries with it the horrible, implicit thought that however grim a picture of life in Coalition Britain earlier Sleaford Mods albums painted, things have now got considerably worse. “What the fuck is happening?” asks a track called Carlton Touts, despairingly. “Bring back the neo-libs, I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to pray for anarchy.”
It’s easy to let this kind of thing overshadow Sleaford Mods’ music, not least because they’re more or less the only people currently doing anything like it. You don’t have to be a protest music obsessive, forever howling at rock’s lack of political engagement and sorrowfully invoking the spirit of Joe Strummer to find it odd that, thus far at least, an event in national life as cataclysmic and divisive as Brexit seems to have passed without any musical comment beyond the contents of this album, Gruff Rhys’s I Love EU and Mike Read’s Ukip Calypso. But Williamson is a far more wide-ranging and skilled lyricist than the Angry Voice of Broken Britain mantle suggests. For one thing, he’s very funny, even when staring into the abyss: “The future is a flag pissed on and a king-sized packet of Quavers”. He’s also really good at pen portraits: the opening Army Nights draws a witty, dark picture of a British Military Fitness instructor moonlighting as a stripper by night, the kind of figure Britpop refuseniks Earl Brutus would once have alighted on with relish. And he is spectacularly good on the subject of hopeless middle-aged hedonism, capturing the way fortysomething attempts to recapture their youth descend into shame and paranoia in cringe-inducing detail on Messy Anywhere (“you’re stuck in moments that have grown out of themselves”) and Drayton Mannered. The protagonist in the latter song ends up “hiding all the nub ends behind the garden shed and looking out for next door to see if they’re watching me”.
You can see why people thought Sleaford Mods’ moment might be fleeting: a flash of scourging, cathartic anger destined to burn itself out quickly. On the evidence of English Tapas, that’s not what’s happened at all. There’s an argument that circumstances have conspired to make them sound even more vital now than in the days when every review of them felt obliged to use the phrase ConDemNation, but English Tapas isn’t a great album just because it’s timely and engaged. Music certainly would feel healthier if other artists were bothering to do something that addressed the kind of topics addressed here, but even if they were, it’s hard to see how they could come up with anything more potent and incisive and blackly funny as this. What English Tapas never sounds like is a band running out of steam. Quite the opposite.
