Sleaford Mods - Divide and Exit

Sleaford Mods

Divide and Exit

28 April 2014

Harbinger Sound

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

Jason Williamson has been speak-rapping his shizzle over the course of more than half a dozen albums now, but it was with Divide and Exit that he and new co-conspirator (on the last three LPs) Andrew Fearn that Sleaford Mods broke through and became impossible to ignore. Williamson is a slam poet of the English working class, boasting about how he just jerked off into your toilet and dissing the bland music of yesteryear: “Chumbawamba weren’t political/They were just crap.” (While this is basically preaching to the choir, it’s refreshing to hear someone say it, regardless.)

 

Impossible to hear without thinking of The Fall, the music of Sleaford Mods is a stripped down post-punk distillation that consists mostly of bass and sampled drums. Fearn’s music—abrasive and groovy in equal proportions—provides a perfect accompaniment to Williamson’s contempt-saturated observations on bleak, poor, post-industrial Englishness. When Williamson snarls, “You scratch my back/I don’t scratch anything/Apart from my nuts,” he fucking means it, mate. Williamson’s rhymes derive from observations on life and the stream-of-consciousness wordplay that follows from them. He doesn’t construct elaborate narratives like those of, for example, Kate Tempest, but he doesn’t need to. Williamson’s power derives from his anger—not simply being angry and punching you in the face, but letting that anger blossom into the beautiful flowers of poetic rage, a lush garden of caustic social commentary… and then punching you in the face.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger