New Model Army – From Here

Ear Music

If you’ve ever read David Zindell‘s Neverness books, you will know there is nothing more badass than a warrior-poet. For nearly four decades now, New Model Army have been some of the hardest-working warrior-poets in the business, touring the world to their legions of fans (the NMA Family) and still somehow managing to find time to bang out album after album of finely-crafted rock music. Focused around Justin Sullivan‘s masterful lyricism, their sound has changed drastically over the years, but has remained instantly recognisable. There really is nobody else quite like them.

From Here is their fifteenth studio album, and it draws on their storied career to yet again provide something different but familiar. With 2016’s Winter having largely eschewed the percussive, experimental nature of 2013’s Between Dog And Wolf in favour of more straight-up folk-infused rock, From Here takes the lessens learned from BDAW and applies them to that genre, with magical consequences.

Opener “Passing Through” starts with Neurosis-style ominous synths as Justin intones “I was in a hurry, I hit the road young”, before building via tambourines, bass and guitars into an epic landscape. By the time the drums kick in they’ve showcased everything that makes them great. It’s like a statement of intent; an overture.

The album as a whole is extremely varied, yet utterly consistent. From the righteous apocalypticism and tribal drumming (think Kate Bush‘s “Sat In Your Lap”) of “End Of Days” to the moshpit-friendly “Watch And Learn”, there’s a thread running through this album that draws the songs together into a tight unit. “Watch And Learn” is an angry commentary on, among other things, today’s toxic Internet culture. I was listening to it yesterday while watching footage of the Proud Boys getting their asses handed to them in Portland by Antifa, and it was a perfect fit.

But of course, this being NMA, it’s not all anger and conflict. There’s also a profound love of nature and the world. Especially the sea. Towards the end of the album, Sullivan really unleashes his inner (well, maybe not so inner) salty sea-dog with the beautifully restrained “Maps”. And there’s intimacy here too — he excels at narrative songs in the Bob Dylan / Bruce Springsteen vein, little looks into the lives of ordinary people, a skill used here to great effect on “Where I Am”.

There’s always been something fractal about NMA in the way they focus in on the tiniest minutiae of everyday life while still taking a broad panoramic view of the world and everything in it. And there’s always something new on every listen. Ask me in a year’s time and I’ll tell you things about From Here that it has not even occurred to me to think about yet. Like The Bad Seeds, New Model Army make albums to be lived with and inhabited. They don’t give up all their secrets on the first listen, or even the tenth. And the process of trying to uncover them is such fun that before you know it they’ve become, ironically enough, part of the Family.

-Justin Farrington-