SAM FENDER: SEVENTEEN GOING UNDER (POLYDOR)
The talented North Shields troubadour is back with a second album that is both exhilarating and exhausting
★★★★★
TFender is refreshingly attuned to his own hypocrisies
he north of England’s (belated) answer to Bruce Springsteen continues his crusade to keep Britain safe for rock ’n’ roll on a rousing second album. Sam Fender hails from the impoverished fishing town of North Shields (effectively a suburb of Newcastle, but don’t say that to a Geordie). He made a stir in 2018 with haunting single Dead Boys,
addressing male suicide, but that intimate side to the piercingly handsome young singer-songwriter was increasingly supplanted by rockier instincts as his star rose.
The chart-topping 2019 debut album Hypersonic Missiles amped up his angry-young-man persona with thunderous E Street Band-style horns and pianos, allied to a taut beat and silvery guitar blend borrowed shamelessly from American alt-rockers
War on Drugs (a band with more than a bit of Springsteen in its own DNA). And that is unabashedly the sound of Fender’s follow-up, only more so.
Seventeen Going Under opens with thunderous energy on the title track’s despairing autobiographical account of teenage anxiety and barely lets up for 11 raging tracks until the final blast of The Dying Light as Fender roars defiance at the iniquities of life: “I’m damned if I give up tonight / I must repel the dying light / For Mam and Dad and all my pals / For all the ones who didn’t make the night.”
It is exhilarating if, frankly, exhausting.
Fender turned 27 in April, and this is an album shot through with the adrenalin of youth, unapologetically directed at his own generation. The Leveller evokes “teenage dreams of Armageddon” in towns where “fear is the closest thing to fun”.
Paradigms turns on the toxicity of social media: “Every image of perfection starts a goldmine / They gave you bulimia, those marketing masterminds.” He certainly doesn’t mince words. The ear-burning Aye offers a supercharged attack on the super-rich that posits a sinister hand behind everything from Jesus being nailed to the cross to the sexual depravity of Jeffrey Epstein and includes a witheringly ironic chant of “Hate the poor! Hate the poor!”
But Fender is refreshingly attuned to his own hypocrisies. He tackles his failures as a partner in Get You Down, emotionally addresses his difficult relationship with his father in Spit of You and gives himself a wise pep talk on Mantra, which briefly lowers the furious tempo to a dreamy pulse. The album’s only ballad, Last to Make it Home, offers more resonant relief from the near relentless tide of frustration and anger, as Fender mournfully wrestles with faith and love in a world that has left him “godless and wrecked”. Addressed to a Mary who might be holy virgin or romantic ideal, it is so Springsteen-ish as to verge on pastiche, yet sustained by Fender’s passionate conviction and melodic grace.
Seventeen Going Under would benefit from more such restraint, to really bring out the vulnerability and sensitivity underpinning Fender’s oeuvre. It is not much of a criticism to note that he doesn’t have the dynamic range of his musical hero yet. Fender may not be ready to take on the mantle of The Boss, but he’s a worthy apprentice.
Neil Mccormick
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