Sleaford Mods
English Tapas

The best rock band around and the only real great musical novelty regarding the underground and alternative sphere of the Western world at this specific historical moment could only emerge from the geopolitical reality that more than any other (yes, more than Donald Trump's United States of America) has manifestly become a representative of conservative principles and ideologies, ideally taking the country and Europe sixty years back in time.

I am obviously talking about the United Kingdom and specifically the United Kingdom of 'Brexit,' which is also at the center of attention these days for the dramatic events in Manchester (which have again touched the heart of the music world) and London, and for the direct political confrontation happening right now between Theresa May and that fine gentleman Jeremy Corbyn.

The Sleaford Mods are a Nottingham-based duo composed of vocalist Jason Williamson and musician Andrew Fearn (since 2012). Since 2007, they have released a series of publications that have not achieved great acclaim and attention from the critics and an audience that has immediately elevated them to a cult band status. The moment they perhaps began to gain more notoriety was in 2015 when the duo appeared in a collaboration on The Prodigy's album 'The Day Is My Enemy.'

In the same year, the album 'Key Markets' (Harbinger Sound) was released, finally garnering attention from more popular critics, receiving positive reviews on Pitchfork and The Guardian, for example. More importantly, the duo produced a documentary film directed by Paul Sng and Nathan Hannawin about their UK tour coinciding with the 2015 political elections pitting conservative candidate David Cameron against the labor candidate Ed Miliband.

'Sleaford Mods - Invisible Britain,' born from an idea by Paul Sng after interviewing the duo in 2014, can somehow be considered the ideological manifesto of Sleaford Mods. The documentary does not exclusively contain musical content but focuses on the representation of the state of affairs in the United Kingdom on the eve of the elections, particularly with the direct contribution of Williamson and Fearn, either interviewed directly or in situations of community engagement.

I wanted to write about this work immediately after listening to it, essentially in the days of its release, because the true feeling that emerges (from the listening) is one of a certain urgency. I'm talking about an expressive, polemical urgency, which is in some way typical of our times where everything seems to be changing at a speed we cannot control. It truly seems we cannot control anything at all, to put it bluntly. An urgency that is an explosion conceptually comparable to the effects of what the punk boom might have been at the end of the 1970s in the UK and then around the world. Although obviously, the media impact is entirely different and will for obvious reasons never reach those dimensions, but for this reason, nor will it lend itself over time to deviations that ideally have nothing to do with its original content.

The music of Sleaford Mods and 'English Tapas' (released on Rough Trade Records on March 3, 2017, and recorded by Steve Mackey at West Heath Garage Studios in London) has been variably defined as hip-hop, minimal, electronic, and obviously punk for its attitude. A friend of mine who has lived for a long time in the UK insists on defining them also in relation to the social context they narrate in their songs, as a 'folk' reality as if they were, on a communicative level, practically the same as Bob Dylan's music in the '60s: music with significant social value. Not only for that rebellious attitude but also for the ideological content.

From this point of view, I recall writing something of this nature about Serengeti aka David Cohn (he's the nephew of Sonny Cohn, Count Basie's trumpeter...) and his music (particularly his album 'Kenny Dennis LP') right here a few years ago, just after the 2008 economic crisis in the United States. His music, being born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, between the predominantly black South Side and the Olympic Fields suburbs, perfectly represented the social situation of that part of the United States. It did on a content level but also through sound, which could generally be defined as hip hop or rap, yet it grounded itself in the heritage of blues and jazz music and was inevitably influenced by garage bands like Ty Segall and the blending and crossover of genres typical of Beck Hansen and Sufjan Stevens (with whom he participated in the Sysyphus project) to name just two significant figures.

In this specific case too, in my opinion, any genre definition, however valid, constitutes a limitation.

The Sleaford Mods are obviously inspired by the UK-made mod subculture and the rave culture, garage, and British electronic music of the '90s (like The Prodigy), and of course hip-hop music and culture, starting with the declared admiration for the Wu-Tang Clan, which Williamson has cited among his influences along with seemingly distant genres and artists from the duo's sound like Guns N' Roses and black metal.

In the desire to reconnect to a social as well as musical phenomenon from the past, I consider Sleaford Mods a rock group. The best rock group around. I'll try to explain why.

Just like in the '60s and '70s, years of profound cultural transformation that ultimately defined the events and social evolution over the next twenty years and through to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Rolling Stones were both among the causes and the result of the social context from which they emerged, the same is happening today for Sleaford Mods.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones were a phenomenon of culture and clearly musicality where the content was in both cases something brazen because it went against the conventions of the society of the time: such was their music and their culture, from the interest in the social reality of their country to the important 'discovery' of what was the reality of the United States of America, the condition of African Americans, and what their culture was. An extensive culture but crushed by the dominant power of conservative whites.

Sleaford Mods have done the same. Their sound is a contamination of musical genres that are generally part of what could be defined as 'subculture' and simply the product of a social and cultural reality that is not considered dominant, but rather relegated to the margins. The process of Williamson and Fearn in this sense has been not just to narrate in their lyrics the truth of these social contexts that constitute the real United Kingdom and the true nature of the entire European continent we live in today; but they have chosen to do so using the same 'tools' that those who inhabit these spaces use to narrate their place and life, in this way breaking that non-existent barrier between different worlds and the austere and intolerant facade that England strives to show to the world and its inhabitants, so close and so distant to all its inhabitants who reside in the rest of Europe and the world.

All this makes the Sleaford Mods simply the most significant thing to emerge from the United Kingdom since the explosion of the Rolling Stones, and 'English Tapas' is obviously the most beautiful record released so far in the year 2017.