FEATURE:
My Five Favourite Albums of 2021
Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs
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IT is unusual that…
all of my favourite albums of a year are from British artist. My final inclusion is from an American artist, though my first four are British. Sleaford Mods are the only group included in my top five (though, technically, they are a duo). One of the most consistent acts in the world, Spare Ribs ranks alongside their very best work. Released back in January, the eleventh album from the duo sees Jason Williamson on fine form as singer and lyricist. There is typically excellent production work from Andrew Fearn. Spare Ribs features guest appearances from Amy Taylor and Billy Nomates. I am going to come onto a couple of reviews for the album, as it received huge praise. It is one of my favourite albums of this year, as the production and musical invention is at Sleaford Mods’ peak. The lyrics are assuredly acerbic, funny and honest. Spare Ribs is sign that Sleaford Mods seem to grow better and more popular with age. I am also eager to explore a couple of interviews published around the time of the album’s release. Released on the Rough Trade label, get a copy of an amazing album. Here is what Rough Trade observe about Spare Ribs:
“Poised to blow the cobwebs off life and unleash some much-needed wit and charm upon us, Sleaford Mods are back with their astonishing 6th studio album, entitled Spare Ribs.
Recorded in lockdown in a furious three-week studio blitz at JT Soar in July, the polemical Jason Williamson and dexterous producer Andrew Fearn kick against the pricks with unrivalled bite, railing against hypocrisy, inequality and apathy with their inimitable, scabrous sense of humour. And Spare Ribs, featuring Amy Taylor of Melbourne punks Amyl and the Sniffers and the British newcomer Billy Nomates, finds the duo charged with ire at the UK Government’s sense of entitlement, epitomized by its devil-may-care approach to the coronavirus crisis.
Commenting on the new album Jason says, “'Our lives are expendable under most governments, secondary under a system of monetary rule. We are stock if you like, parts on a shelf for the purposes of profit, discarded at any moment if fabricated or non-fabricated crisis threatens productivity. This is constant, obviously and notably in the current pandemic. The masses cannot be present in the minds of ill-fitting leaders, surely? Or else the realisation of their catastrophic management would cripple their minds. Much like the human body can still survive without a full set of ribs we are all 'spare ribs’, preservation for capitalism, through ignorance and remote rule, available for parts”.
I guess, as they are now, Sleaford Mods have released seven albums. Andrew Fearn joined in 2012. He has brought something to the table that distinguishes the Nottingham twosome from anyone else. In this interview with Aquarium Drunkard, Jason Williamson talks about (among other things) the weirdness of the pandemic, in addition to working with two incredible female artists on Spare Ribs:
“Since 2012 when beatmaker Andrew Fearn joined, the Sleaford Mods have made seven albums, combining raw poetry with brutal beats. The spareness and political edge of the lyrics links the band to punk rock—Iggy Pop and the late Mark E. Smith were both fans—but the emphasis on beats rather than live music puts them somewhere adjacent to rap. Wherever they fall, no other band working currently is as adept at channeling acid disdain into working class poetry. Spare Ribs refines and enlarges their sound, bringing in female artists like Billy Nomates and Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers to guest on two tracks.
As we talk the pandemic is still reverberating through Williamson’s personal and professional lives. We’d been scheduled to connect a week earlier, but a bump in COVID cases at his daughter’s school had forced a cancellation and he couldn’t make the call. Though no one in his immediate family had been sick, Williamson is still clearly processing a year from hell. “Out There” encapsulates 2020’s shapeless dread in the line, “Just stared out into a cold month with no people near it.”
“That’s how it was in April and even into May. It was going for your allotted walk every day, and it just seemed very barren. Deserted. You know what I mean?” says Williamson, explaining that he and Andrew Fearn and guest artist Billy Nomates had tracked some of Spare Ribs in January. Then the Mods left for Australia. By the time they got back, the virus had set in. He spent nearly all of 2020 in Nottingham in a house with his partner and children.
Sleaford Mods draw a very male crowd; their aggression and political outspoken-ness speaks to an older generation raised on hardcore punk and post-punk. Yet the band has always wanted to be inclusive, communicating to a multi-racial, multi-cultural Britain where, as “Out There” puts it, “I wanna tell the bloke that’s drinking near the shop/That it ain’t the foreigners and it ain’t the fuckin’ Cov/But he don’t care.”
Likewise, Williamson says, they’ve always wanted to make women welcome at their shows and among their fan base and, with this album, they bring the female presence right into the studio with three collaborations with female artists. “We wanted to represent women more, we wanted to represent the female presence, because there’s a lot of it,” says Williamson. We’ve always been affiliated with that, but we wanted to make it work even more.”
Billy Nomates, who sings a verse and chorus in “Mork ‘N Mindy,” first appeared on the Mods radar when she started sending Fearn Instagram video of her home-taped recordings. “And eventually Andrew started sending them to me and we started watching them and it became clear that she had something. There was something there,” says Williamson. “So, we started talking to her. We got to know her, and she released her own album on Spotify, so we started listening to that a lot, and it became clear that she was really, really good.”
Amy Taylor’s cameo on “Nudge It” is tough and blistering. Her disdain for artists that don’t work hard enough matches something in essential in Williamsons’ art. But working her verse into the song took longer, because it happened after lockdown and had to be accomplished with file transfers. “Amy went into the studio and did a take and she sent it over. I thought it was great, but everybody else was a little bit unsure where it was going. She sent some more stuff over, and we finally nailed it around July of last year,” says Williamson.
Nomates and Taylor are both punk rockers, a natural fit for the Sleaford Mods’ twitchy, hyper-articulate composition. Dr. Lisa McKenzie who wrote the intro to “Top Room” (“All them skills, all that sewing, all that making Marks & Spencer’s knickers”) is an academic and activist, but Williamson explains how she aligns with his work. “I’ve known Lisa for years. She’s a working class academic, thoroughly steeped in working class history, culture, and she surrounds herself with it,” he says. “But Lisa is really into the history of it, and really into the way the working class move forward as civilization for want of a better word progresses. I always liked her viewpoint. I find it interesting. So, I thought that part of a spoken word intro would be really powerful”.
Taking things to September of this year, NME spoke to Williamson, as Sleaford Mods played the End of the Road festival. It seems that, even though Spare Ribs is such a good album, the duo had no idea that it would be successful and see them reach a new audience:
“Before you released ‘Spare Ribs’, did you have an inkling that this would be the album that kicked Mods up a notch?
“No! Fucking no chance. I remember writing ‘Mork n Mindy’; we did an early demo and got Tor [aka future-punk Billy Nomates] to do her bits – it took her about 20 minutes – and we were like, ‘This fits so well’. It needed work, but we knew that tune was gonna be really good. When we did ‘Nudge It’ [featuring Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor], we knew that one was gonna be good. So we knew the two singles would elevate it. Everything else around it was good, but I didn’t think it would take off the way it did. I’ll be honest with you: I thought after [2017 album] ‘English Tapas’, we were gonna do a series of integral albums, but it would just remain [at one level]. But it’s gone up!”
Why do you think that is?
“I think it’s the lockdown. With people being caged up and really starting to connect to the hopelessness of that, I think that fed through the songs and connected with people. The songs are good as well!”
Do you think people can truly move classes?
“I think you do status-wise. If you move to a middle-class area, you can’t really say you’re working-class any more. You’re simply not – you’ve moved up. I wouldn’t say I’m working-class now – definitely not – but I still talk the same way I always have and have that same mentality. I look at things and react to them in the way that I would 25 years ago. I don’t think that leaves you in a lot of respects. You can educate yourself, of course, but generally speaking…”
So moving up in the world doesn’t affect Mods’ righteous anger?
“The only thing that’s difficult is keeping it interesting. My own personal class identity, I don’t struggle with. I perhaps did a few years back, when we started getting big. People are accusing you of selling out and all this bullshit. It’s like, ‘Try touring for two years mate!’”
What’s next for the Mods, then?
“We’ve started writing. We’ve got 10 songs. The lyrics talk about the isolation and the paranoia, things that kept creeping up and – especially in the second lockdown – your relationship with your partner. Not so much that it deteriorated, because it didn’t, but we got sick of each other, so that takes you into a new consciousness of that relationship. I explored that a little bit. [Most of] these [new] songs won’t hold up. They’re not very good! So it’s just a case of trawling through the shit to get to the gold again”.
Apart from DIY not being overly-keen on Spare Ribs (not sure why!), the reviews for Spare Ribs were hugely positive. Maybe the lyrics resonated at a particularly bleak time for the U.K. and world at large. The partnership between Williamson and Fearn and the way they can fuse brilliant lyrics with lo-fi production genius means they are always evolving and releasing such amazing music. CLASH definitely got to the bottom of why Spare Ribs is one of this year’s very best albums:
“Nottingham punk duo Sleaford Mods are a relentless tour de force when it comes to attacking a range of unpleasantries in British life.
This time they depict the value of human lives, addressing their expendability in the view of government and the elite, critical comparisons are made between lives and ‘spare ribs’ in capitalism. Sonically, connections are adjusted to the theme. It is the strong, self-assured and grounded sound of two people who understand their role as musicians and take responsibility for it.
Confidently hinting at what the next phase in their music partnership might be, the featured guest appearances from Amy Taylor of Melbourne punk rockers Amyl and The Sniffers and Bristol-based Billy Nomates add finesse and energy to this record.
A raw snapshot perfectly designed to capture the ugliest sides of Britain, it’s obvious that the duo is happy to knock at our doors once again. There’s an ongoing need for this portrayal of relevant topics, and their sharpness and humour are as strong as ever.
Brexit, immigration, lockdown and the fight for the independent venues, it’s all in there. Never before has there been a greater need for the full Sleaford Mods treatment than there is now, and the goods are delivered with crisp urgency and precision”.
I am coming back to NME for a review of Spare Ribs. They gave it a five-star thumbs-up when they sat down with it. It makes me wonder whether Sleaford Mods can get even better and keep releasing albums of this calibre:
“Instrumentalist Andrew Fearn’s work is often erroneously described as ‘minimalist’, his work badly underrated. In fact, he creates intricate and immersive grooves that most rhythm sections would envy – these are perfect backbone jams for his partner’s kitchen sink horrorshow lyricism. Look no further than the cyclical, bassy flow of recent single ‘Shortcummings’, with Williamson predicting the downfall of Boris Johnson’s former Barnard Castle-bothering Gollum-in-chief Dominic Cummings: “He’s gonna mess himself so much, but it’s all gonna come down hard”.
Call it ‘pared-back’ if you will, but there’s a lot going on here. There’s gnarly danciness to the title track that recalls LCD Soundsystem’s debut album, while ‘Nudge It’ marries an attack on dull, vulturous class tourists “stood outside a high-rise / Trying to act like a gangster” with jagged post-punk riffs, bouncing hip-hop loops and snarling bravado courtesy of guest vocalist Amy Taylor of Aussie punks Amyl & The Sniffers.
Taylor breathes a new life into the Mods’ world, as does another rare guest turn from fellow East Midlander Billy Nomates (aka Tor Maries), who lends her cool-as-fuck laissez faire drawl to ‘Mork N Mindy”s gothic, electro tale of boredom and alienation in beige suburbia, wryly noting: “You’re not from round here, crashed landed about a week ago / Yeah, I feel for you, I do”.
Williamson’s gallows humour is on top form throughout ‘Spare Ribs’. The Prodigy-inspired ‘I Don’t Rate You’ is gleefully bilious (“I hate what you do / And I don’t like you”), while on the bouncy ‘Elocution’ he feigns Received Pronunciation to tear down posh fair-weather bands “secretly hoping that by agreeing to talk about the importance of independent venues”, they’ll never have to play them again. And then comes the sledgehammer putdown chorus: “I wish I had the time to be a wanker just like you”. Ouch.
Lockdown stress spills over on the anxious and claustrophobic ‘Top Room’ and eerie album centrepiece ‘Out There’. The latter is a perfectly tragicomic painting of our Plague Island, occupied by children crying into their cereal and COVID-conspiracy racists boozing outside the shops, with Williamson’s catchy new slogan “let’s get Brexit fucked by a horse’s penis”. Put that on the side of the bus.
‘Spare Ribs’ is driven by what comedian Stewart Lee – a friend of the band – recently described to NME as Williamson’s “powerless rage”, but there’s still space for a little beauty. ‘Fishcakes’ closes the record with heart and tenderness as the frontman looks back on making the most of the simple things as a kid: “And when it mattered – and it always did – at least we lived”. ‘Spare Ribs’ is the first truly great album of the year, and the best of the Mods’ career. How many acts could say that of their 11th record (if we’re counting those deep cuts)? The Fall, arguably? It’s some achievement.
Williamson and Fearn unflinchingly show you life – particularly the shittier corners of it, while flashing a swift middle finger at those who create them. Here’s your prescribed dose of reality with an unmistakable and intoxicating Sleaford Mods flavour. The extraordinary ‘Spare Ribs’ is graffiti on a concrete wall; there’s no manifesto, no easy answers and nowhere to hide”.
One of my top picks for albums of 2021, Sleaford Mods delivered the goods with the exceptional Spare Ribs. Consistently engaging and innovative, the fertile minds of Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn are at their peak. I can imagine, given everything that has happened in politics since Spare Ribs, the guys have ammunition for a new album. Receiving new music from Sleaford Mods is…
ALWAYS a real treat.