Label: Attack Attack Format: CD
“I didn’t know they were still going” says anyone I tell, all breathless and excited, about the fact that New Model Army have a new album out, their second in as many years, and then they usually laugh laugh at me a bit. So I tell them to fuck off. Unfashionable though it may be to like (or admit to a liking of) Justin Sullivan‘s proto-Crusty post-punk revolution, the fact remains that they are still one of the tightest, most intelligent bands operating in the field of unreconstructed Rock music. And that’s no bad thing. And on record? The same, if you turn your stereo up loud enough.
Eight is, quite frankly, a fucking stunning return to form for a band who only really slipped a little bit on last year’s Strange Brotherhood (which still contained some of their finest and stirring moments – live favourite “No Pain” for example, or the gorgeous “Big Blue”) by trying to change their job description a little. Sullivan has obviously realised that what NMA do best, what NMA always need to be around to do because no-one else really can, is the mostunifying, uplifting and downright bitchin’ prostest songs a bloke with a funny haircut ever stood on his mate’s shoulders and drank cider to. Grim Northerners not too scared to let a few low-key ballads through the net every once in a while. Sensitive new men built like brick shit-houses who are fond of the word “bastard” and have managed to spearhead an entire battalion of hitch-hiking, clog-wearing, pyramid-building disciples over the (fuck!) fifteen-odd years of their career.
So, enough of their excuses already. Lacking the time an Army album usually has to grow and earn a place in your heart, I can nonetheless say that of the first couple of listens, Eight is fucking great. this is a band returned to the anger and passion of something like “Here comes The War”, but with the tunes of stuff like “Green And Grey”. Sullivan is still pissed off, and still knows how to make the political personal (and vice versa) is to hop from huge-scale heavy concept international scale (“You weren’t in Waco/And you weren’t in Kosovo”) to small local-scale (the whole of “Leeds Road 3am”) to the unexpectedly touching (“Hale-Bopp flying motionless out across the night/And you turned to me and said with a smile/everything these days seems to be some kind of sign”) without warning, to drive home the relevance of interconnected events.
Of course, there’s the more specific “Snelsmore Wood” (“Where the yellow jackets stand with the Thick Blue Line” – environmental activism is still a recurring theme here) or “Someone Like Jesus” (“I met someone like Jesus in the spring of ’98/He was so full of live and I was so full of hate/So I nailed him on a cross where he belonged/Told myself it’s what he would have wanted all along”) as if to remind us that Justin S. is an indicidual, not just some generic guitar-playing agitiator. Indeed, all is as it should be for a New Model army album. Welcome back, you grim Northern bastards. I’ll see you in Hull.
-Deuteronemu 90210, actress and supermodel-
