NEW ALBUMS

Lincs duo go for heart as well as spleen as they open up over lockdown and look back to the ’80s. By Victoria Segal. Illustration by Sam Hadley.

Sleaford Mods serve up Spare Ribs; plus Steven Wilson, Avalanches, Aaron Frazer, Kiwi Jr and more.

“The music, always a loaves and fishes stretch, bulks out whole worlds with very little.”

Sleaford Mods ★★★★ Spare Ribs ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP

AS A TEENAGER, Jason Williamson just wanted to be famous. He didn’t know exactly how he could make it happen, he tells MOJO, he just knew he didn’t “want this shit”. Sitting in his bedroom in Grantham in the mid-’80s, he’d avidly scan the style magazines thinking, “‘Wow, just look at all these interesting people in London’… I fell for it big time.” After Sleaford Mods released their formal debut Austerity Dogs in 2013, there’s no doubt frontman Williamson and his spectral co-conspirator Andrew Fearn did become faces – just not quite in the way a 16-year-old eagerly reading about Tim Roth and Mantronix might have imagined back in 1986. Instead, the duo have taken on the role of tattered, bill-stickered poster-boys for modern British decline, their music coming with a uric tang of rage, violence and neglect, railing against a system that blocks the escape routes with intractable, implacable disdain. “Get Brexit punched/Let’s get Brexit fucked by a horse’s penis,” spits Williamson at one point on Spare Ribs, their sixth album, and once again, Nick Kamen seems a very long way away.

Given their previous hair-trigger form, you might have put money on Sleaford Mods being the band most likely to be sent into full-on, knife-in-teeth Walking Dead meltdown by 2020. Yet while the band’s fury at corruption, incompetence and duplicity remains fierce (“Why’s this cunt got police protection/He wasn’t even running in the last election/I bet his partner at night says things like ‘It’s all for the good of your ideas’”), Spare Ribs is a strikingly layered response to harder times. Since 2017’s English Tapas at least, they have been alert to the need to recalibrate and readjust – on 2019’s Eton Alive, Williamson’s singing voice caused quite a stir – and like the actor Williamson always wanted to be (he had a cameo in Ben Wheatley’s recent adaptation of Rebecca), their range has subtly widened. For a start, Spare Ribs marks the first time Williamson and Fearn have opened up their two-man creative bubble, inviting Amy Taylor of Melbourne’s Amyl And The Sniffers and the Bristol-based Billy Nomates (AKA Tor Maries) to guest on the album, their appearances adding more light and shade to Sleaford Mods’ typically harsh fluorescent glare. “It’s such a shame that every person that I meet needs smacking in the head,” from the full-pelt, sledgehammer-titled Shortcummings, is still one of the album’s key sing-along, print-it-on-a-T-shirt lines – but that’s not all that’s left echoing after the record ends.

was recorded in the summer, just after the first restrictions started to lift: “The first few days were a bit weird,” admits Williamson, “Andrew hadn’t seen anybody, really, and neither had we, but then we got into it. It took about another three weeks and we’d done it.” The title refers to people who are treated as dispensable, surplus, necessary wastage: “We’re all so Tory-tired/And beaten by minds small,” husks Williamson on brief, lyrical opener A New Brick, a surreal barker’s call that sets out the album’s stall.

Meanwhile, the title track offers stark images from a failing society, homeless spice-users congregating “under a concrete Jesus Christ”. Nothing gives. The music, though, sounds tremendous. Always a loaves-and-fishes stretch, it miraculously manages to bulk out whole worlds from very little: low sclerotic frequencies on the gleeful trolling of I Don’t Rate You; Elocution’s scrapyard Human League; LCD Soundsystem broken down for parts on Spare Ribs. Out There, an explicit pandemic track that evilly starts with a cough, comes with an elastic, jazz-inflected slither, bending and weaving like someone trying to keep their distance through the newly paranoid streets. It’s an eerie sci-fi trip into something that looks normal but is deeply wrong, Williamson swerving the conspiracy theorists on the way past the shops and the clinic, before thoughts of an unelected official “putting milk in the bowls of his children’s inevitable tears every morning” crashes in.

If outside is bad, it’s not so great inside, either. “I think

I want something to come out of my phone that ain’t there,” says Williamson astutely on the bleepy claustrophobia of Top Room, the sound of agitated pacing between too-small walls, a mood echoed on the panicked no-escape self-reckoning of All Day Ticket. Yet a shrunken world also forces introspection. Mork N Mindy predates the pandemic, a beautifully bleak and eerie recreation of Sunday-night childhood in a “really depressing cul-de-sac” of divorces. Billy Nomates’ raw-edged contribution – “You’re not from round here/Crash-landed about a week ago” – underlines the alienation. You can’t be a funny rainbow-braced Martian when you’re lost on your own planet.

Even more poignant is Fishcakes, an examination of Williamson’s childhood directly triggered by endless lockdown thoughts, its references to chip shop trips and second-hand presents (“scouring the papers at Christmastime”) made more poignant by the frailty of Williamson’s vocals and the one-bar gothic glow. “And when it mattered and it always did/At least we live,” he sings. It’s the opposite of Spare Ribs – all heart.

There’s plenty of pettier, funnier stuff, too. Nudge It, featuring a blast of Amy Taylor’s astringent vocals, attacks clueless class tourists – “Stood outside a high rise/Trying to act like a gangster” – while Elocution’s introduction is delivered in mean-spirited, prissy received pronunciation, Williamson playing a musician speaking out for independent venues in the secret hope that one day they will “be in a position to move away from playing independent venues.” After the past 12 months, you might feel you want and need more escapism than Spare Ribs really offers. Yet if everyone’s been made to gaze into the abyss this year, it’s a relief, a comfort – maybe even a pleasure – to find Sleaford Mods in there, gazing right back into you.