In case some/any of you haven't by now gotten familiar with the Sleaford Mods, here's one of their more well-known performances:

When I come across some new, unique favorite English band of mine that I spin for weeks after, I always recall Bjork's commentary of "how you can't get away with bullshitting in England" (at least far as the music and arts go, I suppose - and insofar that, yes, I could only altogether completely agree... somebody - well, Aidan Hughes, really - I know him from Prague - explained it to me once like this: in the UK, if you're an artist, you never get any compliments or appreciation or good reviews or whatever for whatever it is you're doing, all you get is constant mockery, criticism and taking the piss at, all making it rather tense and building that character of not giving a fuck on one hand, I guess, and not really being overly concerned with public opinion on the other, which makes up for that kind of sometimes raw and brutal authenticity...)

Anyway, original article from NME (about Sleaford Mods and their latest release, also perfectly capturing/describing the spirit of their art/music and characters) here:

A few weeks into the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown, Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson suffered a serious injury. After giving up drugs and alcohol a few years ago, he’d become “addicted to the gym,” as he puts it, “which is certainly better than taking loads of cocaine,” but with fitness centres closed indefinitely and under mounting pandemic stress, he began working out obsessively at home: “I overdid it, pulled something, and was out for the count.” He had badly aggravated existing back problems caused by his having spina bifida as a child, which led to chronic pain until he had a major operation aged 12.

It was only after Williamson had spent decades trying to make it as a performer in a procession of failed guitar bands and low-key solo projects that Sleaford Mods took off. In 2010, he had a spot performing ranting spoken-word over aggressive beats on a crowded line-up at 60-capacity Nottingham venue The Chameleon. That same night, another long-time grafter Andrew Fearn, an electronic music obsessive, was DJing pop hits that he’d remixed to the point that they were unrecognisably twisted.

They hit it off and started working together, Fearn taking over completely from the project’s previous beatmaker Simon Parfrement in 2012. From the outset, there was a fizzling tension between their two styles that remains the band’s core to this day. “It was just very instant,” Fearn tells NME in a separate phone call. “It didn’t need a lot of thinking about.”

Williamson had already released a slew of lo-fi tapes under the Sleaford Mods name, but Fearn’s relentless instrumentals elevated his furious streams of consciousness – channeling all those years of exasperation and spleen built up over a career’s worth of knock backs – to until they finally started to gain the attention they always felt they deserved. By 2013’s ‘Austerity Dogs’ they were underground music darlings, and by the following year’s ‘Divide And Exit’ they were circling the mainstream. As Britain buckled more and more under the austerity of endless Conservative governments, and as populist demagogues rose to actual political power, their ability to so viscerally describe the reality of life on the brink saw Fearn and Williamson emerge from the margins as essential voices.

On ‘Spare Ribs’, Sleaford Mods have lost none of that ire, but its increased introspection makes it unlike anything the band have produced before. In the past, Sleaford Mods’ music thrived on pure ferocity, Williamson’s breathless, ranting vocals and considerable descriptive power combined with Fearn’s primal instrumentals. Their most enduring tracks, such as ‘Jobseeker’ and ‘Tied Up In Nottz’, are also their most rabid. Although 2019’s ‘Eton Alive’ saw the occasional foray into the dark and downcast with tracks such as ‘When You Come Up To Me’, ‘Spare Ribs’ opens up vast new emotional palettes.

On the music inspired by his childhood, Fearn’s instrumentals are cloying, choking and bleak, and there’s a desperation to Williamson’s voice that feels more panicked and precarious than on the political fury of old. As well as his established ranting delivery he’s employed in the past, there are moments where he sings with abandon or lets himself play daft. The collaborative tracks even border on poppy. Billy Nomates’ slick soulfulness provides the perfect foil to Williamson’s staccato. “Andrew said the end of ‘Nudge It,’ when me and Amy are singing together, reminded him of Grease,” he laughs.

Spare Ribs’’ colossal expansion of emotional range makes it the best album of Sleaford Mods’ career, featuring some of their most creative beats and vocal performances of remarkable range. Yet they’ve always been far more complex than one man ranting and another pressing play on a laptop. The sparseness and spikiness of their music, and Williamson’s provocative lyrics, can often disguise their thoughtfulness and subtlety; they process the sheer confusion and strangeness of existence in the 21st century as often as they attack those responsible.

“We’re all spare ribs, depending on our financial status” – Jason Williamson

Does Sleaford Mods feel they have a duty to use their platform in this way? “Completely. Absolutely. But you’ve got to do the back work with it. You’ve got to be careful and not attach any ego to it. We live in such a cynical time that you start to question yourself and why you do it.”

The key is not to overthink it, he says. Six records into their career, the duo’s workmanlike approach is key to their relentless progress. At the same time, Britain’s gradually worsening socio-economic situation – a decline set into overdrive by the coronavirus calamity– is throwing the gulf between classes that Williamson writes about into starker and starker focus, injecting the band’s work with round after round of vitality. As things get worse and worse, Sleaford Mods are only getting better.

I haven't yet gotten to listening to their latest album reviewed here, but resonate with a lot of what it goes into and talks about. From the very beginning, the quitting of drugs and substituting that with a lot of physical exercise, to all the surrounding frustration and disappointment no matter what, the built up resentment and inclination to often cuss and curse and spit, talking in obscenities and insults (in my native Bulgarian it is kind of considered normal and therapeutic, but here in Asia, it appears there isn't such a tradition, haha).

And, of course, I love bands/artists/writers that take into account and context the current broader historical and socio-economic circumstance, instead of drifting off shoegazer land into indecypherable poetry, vulgar displays of wealth (with the implication of having become rich due to being criminal, etc.) and any other self-centered and self-centric exhibitionist acts (which, it seems, sometimes follow a rather novel post-modern principle of "the worse and more tasteless it is, the better"). Art should always also be a political statement of some sort or other, and at least on some level socially engaged, I think.

"Jobseeker" at the beginning very much reminds me of my current situation here. But, it is what it is...