Lucifer Over Lanarkshire: Sleaford Mods

Like the sound of two men fighting over the last chip in a Wetherspoons? Find Half Man Half Biscuit too musically complex?

Then you’ll LOVE Sleaford Mods!

Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn  are said duo, whose punky polemic and tinny drum machine sounds are kind of a microcosm of middle-aged Brexit aggression: ‘mithering’, they call it in Manchester. They grouse, they grumble, they grizzle about how shit contemporary life in the UK is, with gimlet eyed one-liners

and the odd cackle or two. Like an austerity era Vladimir and Estragon they aren’t so much musique concrete as music cement mixer.

Problem is, they don’t really add much in the way of nuance or invention, despite having a pop at guitar bands. You’d get as much insight if you let your tape run in your local boozer.

Iggy Pop may love them, insisting on playing them on his Iggy Confidential show on 6Music as much as is humanly possible, but to me they’re a wee bit uninspired. Still, in a funny way I’m glad they exist. There’s much worse in the world.

(Lucifer Over Lanarkshire)