The Sensible Gray Cells

★★★ Get Back Into The World

DAMAGED GOODS. CD/DL/LP/MC

Second LP by Captain Sensible and Paul Gray, plus Johnny Moped’s Marty Love.

In 2020, recently-returned Damned bassist Paul Gray partnered with pariah’d exDamned drum ace Rat Scabies to record a fifth album as Professor And The Madman; now Gray is back once more, this time with Damned chief Captain Sensible. That’s a lot of Damned diaspora – and, between those two albums, also a vast amount of classic psychedelic rock, which as the peerless early ’80s Black Album and Strawberries suggested, was always the theatrical punks’ collective guilty pleasure. Get Back Into The World leans heavily on pop melodies to gild its garage-psych lilies, with song titles like Stupid Dictators, DJ With Half A Brain and What’s The Point Of Andrew? hammering home their à rebours old-git message. But epic, trippy voyages such as Jam Tomorrow and Another World are the treasures. Really, the vintage Damned should just reunite; oh, they have…