FEATURE:
Spotlight
Bob Vylan
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A tremendous duo…
IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Vylan at the BandLab NME Awards 2022/PHOTO CREDIT: Zoe McConnell
who have just released one of this year’s best and most important albums, Bob Vylan Presents: The Price of Life, Bob Vylan should be on everyone’s radar. A London duo who I am very excited about, they have been around for a little while, though they are starting to get a lot of credit and buzz right now. I wanted to feature them today. I am going to end with a review for their new album. Before that, there are a few interviews I am including. It gives us a greater impression of Bob Vylan and who they are about. Kerrang! spoke with the duo back in December:
“If the true purpose of political music is to say things that comfortable people don’t want to hear – and to a large degree, it certainly is – Bob Vylan are hitting the mark every time. The highest compliment that can be paid to the group’s music is that it possesses the power to put at least some of its listeners ill at ease. 'Neighbours called me n*****, told me to go back to my own country,' they sing on We Live Here. 'White folks love quoting Martin Luther [King]… but don’t forget, white folks still killed him,' are just two of the lines from the recently released Pretty Songs. For generations of listeners too young to remember punk rock in its original form – Johnny Rotten announcing 'I am an antichrist', a band called Millions Of Dead Cops – Bob Vylan are here to revivify, and to relitigate, the movement’s mission statement of shock and awe.
PHOTO CREDIT: Esmé Surfleet
“It’s that thing of not caring [about what people think], to a degree,” says the drummer. “The ends justify the means. Whoever feels insulted about what we’ve said, well it’s got to be done because we’ve got to have [them] understand this thing we’re saying that they might not want us to say.”
rom top to bottom, Bob Vylan appear to be examining everything, flipping it upside down, and turning it around in a search for hidden dangers. In a fleeting but resonantly evocative moment on Take That, from The Price Of Life, they speak of a society that is 'killing off kids with two pound chicken and chips'. Knowing of what he writes, the singer goes onto say that he was 'raised off that but I gave it back – why? – because the body gets sick of that shit, get rid of that shit, wreaks havoc on the heart and liver, and we can’t fight if we’re fighting our ticker'. Once upon a time punk rock was often associated with songs such as Chinese Rocks, Dee Dee Ramone’s (predictably thrilling) paean to dangerously potent heroin. Now, without missing a beat or losing an edge, a young band from London has found the vocabulary required to sing about the virtues of eating a healthy diet. Beat that for progress.
It’s as if the pair have studied a map marked with things that might slow them down, or trip them up, or cause them harm; and, learning from the costly mistakes of others, have used it to plot a safer course to wherever it is they’d like to go. (“Maybe we’ll open up a soup kitchen or something,” says the singer. “Who knows what we might end up doing.”) Whether at home and out on the road – a working environment in which intoxicants are easier to come by than food, healthy or otherwise – the pair abstain from drugs and alcohol. Four decades after Ian MacKaye, from Minor Threat and then Fugazi, sang about being straight-edge – a valiant attempt at providing an alternative commentary to punk’s innumerable songs and stories of routine ruination - here, as elsewhere, Bob Vylan remain wide awake to a perilous past and their own future.
PHOTO CREDIT: Esmé Surfleet
“Having so much life outside of this, and understanding that people are tripping over this stuff all the time, drugs and drink is what knocks people over so much,” says the drummer. “It’s an obstacle people don’t overcome, so why not just not have it there? And also, you’re saving money, it’s better for you, [and] you remember your fucking choices. It’s a no-brainer after that. Why would you do that? Every time you make those kind of decisions [to abstain], it’s one less thing that can become a disruptive force in a band. Especially in this scene. I’ve seen too many people just get way too caught up in doing too much of this stuff. I’ve seen people struggle to try and recover. It seems that, for what it is, it’s just not worth it.”
It’s not worth it because, more than merely earning their burgeoning success, Bob Vylan have built the very infrastructure upon which it grows. Everything here is on their terms. Given this, it stands to reason that, should they come, they will also own their failures, too. As if with this in mind, onstage at Wembley Arena, the singer trips himself up only once. After inviting the crowd to complete the punk aphorism “the only good pig…”, a lone voice from the crowd shouts, “is a dead pig”. Hearing this, the frontman amplifies the words for the benefit of the people at the back. “I’m not saying it,” he says, “I’m just repeating it.” Really, though, if you’re planning to go this far out on a limb, if you’re determined the push this hard against the boundaries, you should at least own it”.
NME have been championing Bob Vylan for a while now and spoke with them recently about their new album and rise. Their latest album is the most personal and urgent they have put out:
“Let’s get this on record,” starts Bobby Vylan with a sense of urgency. “In 2020, there was a year of protests around police abuse, racism and inequality. We, Bob Vylan, released an album [‘We Live Here’] that dealt with that political and social climate. That’s a finger on the pulse.”
Two years later, the grime-punk duo are back with ‘Bob Vylan Presents: The Price Of Life’, a concept album about money, tackling the economy’s impact on your family, your community and you as an individual. “Look at the news. This is the most important and relevant record to be released this year,” Bobby continues, joking that it must look like they are pulling the strings as a cost of living crisis grips the UK. His bandmate Bobbie Vylan adds that “people need this album”.
Continuing their mission, ‘The Price Of Life’ is the spiritual successor to ‘We Live Here’, a record once deemed “too extreme” for release, but there’s more to Bob Vylan’s second album than repeated fury.
“It’s a lot more fun, for a start,” explains Bobby. Tracks like ‘Turn Off The Radio’ and ‘Bait The Bear’ knowingly hit back at their critics while the record expands the duo’s punk/grime sound to include ’90s hip-hop, grunge, dance and reggae. “It wears its influences on its sleeve.”
According to Bobby, ‘We Live Here’ was a “very heavy album, full of personal stories. I was working out a lot of things and the subjects I was speaking about obviously weren’t the easiest to relive.” It meant the record needed to have an urgency and intensity. “After such a serious album, though, it was important to show other sides to the band because we are more than that,” explains Bobbie, neither one of them wanting to be boxed in as just the grime/punk duo constantly screaming about social issues.
That’s not to say ‘The Price Of Life’ is any less vulnerable or hard-hitting. Sure, there are bolshie calls to “eat the rich”, “wage war against the state” and pull down statues of Churchill, but ‘Wicked & Bad’ draws carefully constructed lines between the political landscape of the country, and how it affects people on the ground. Elsewhere ‘Big Man’ is a “very personal song that talks about this pursuit of money through means that aren’t necessarily productive. I’m talking to my younger self on that track,” says Bobby. “But I hope people who are in a similar position know that that doesn’t have to be your whole life.
“These are all true stories,” he continues before describing the process of writing these songs as “therapy through art. I feel very emotional when I listen back to this record because it’s been rough and it just seems to be getting rougher. With this album, we just wanted to detail that”.
In March, Alternative Press spoke with Bob Vylan. Although their sound is individual and their own, it was interesting discovering some of their influences - and how they have developed and built their sound over time:
“How did you end up with the sound you have now?
I think it just came from blending those two things. Growing up and listening to a lot of rap music and a lot of grime music but also listening to rock music and indie music. Once I learned to play the guitar, I knew I wanted to use the guitar to make music, but I didn’t want it to be so straightforward, like this is a rock band or a punk band or an indie band. I wanted to put all my influences together and make something that I felt was missing in my music catalog.
I was and continue to make music for myself, and as a band, that’s what we do. We just make the music that we want to listen to, and that we want to hear and that we don’t feel is being made. It came quite naturally, just wanting to use the guitar, but also not being a virtuoso at the guitar. I can play punk chords, and I can then put that together with a producer’s background that I have and make beats over the top of it.
What were some of those influences that you wanted to pull from or combine?
Definitely things from grime music. Some of the production techniques that they use and even when it comes to the tempo, the BPM of 140, which is a standard grime tempo. The lyrical aspect of that music as well, I still think, is way more complicated than a lot of rock and punk music. I think the cadence, the flow, the wordplay is a lot more interesting. So I knew that I wanted to take the lyrical aspect of that because, to me, what always drew me into that genre of music was the lyrics and what they were talking about and how they were doing it.
The social commentary, the political aspect of punk music, especially because I think that’s lacking from so much contemporary music, but also, I think it’s lacking in punk music… I think just seeing that die and become more mainstream was like, “Where is this music going?” I wanted to take that anger from that music and the political direction of that and blend those things together.
I don’t see [current punk music] as being very challenging to listen to. I almost feel like punk music should make you feel somewhat uncomfortable because the topics that are being discussed in a lot of it. They’re serious issues. But it just seems like they’re being discussed, if at all, in a very happy-go-lucky way. I just didn’t want to do that. So we wanted to make it as confrontational as possible, as confrontational as it was when it first started.
Your music touches on so many important issues. For you, has music been a helpful way to learn?
For me, listening to other people’s music is the way that I’ve been introduced to so many different ways of thinking — some ways that I agree with and some ways that I don’t agree with — and I’m sure our music does a similar thing for other people. But in terms of creating the music, we find inspiration, and the topics or the themes, through lived experience. There’s so many things that have happened in our lives that we could talk about on these records. Some of them, we do. Some of them, we haven’t even really scratched the surface on. But the message is in the music because it’s something that we already live by”.
Before getting to a review and rounding off, there is another interview that I want to source. Upset featured one of the country’s most important and inspiring acts last month. It is clear that Bob Vylan Presents: The Price of Life is a revelation and an album that everyone needs to hear:
“'The Price Of Life' picks up where 2020's 'We Live Here' left off. Driven by the duo's experiences of racism, that record felt like an awakening and 'The Price Of Life' doubles down on this, exploring everything from weaponising health to waging war on the working class. It's an album they couldn't have made a couple of years ago, yet it's the one they've been working towards. Just like Public Enemy couldn't have made 'Fear Of A Black Planet' without first making 'It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back', Bob Vylan needed 'We Live Here' to fully realise 'The Price Of Life'.
"I think it's more empowering. There was a lot of stuff that I was working out personally on 'We Live Here'. There was a lot of frustration and anger from across my lifetime that I was getting out in a very incendiary way," reflects Bobby, who takes his time to carefully curate his answers, like a philosopher pondering his next thesis.
"'We Live Here' was our way of establishing the issues. People have been talking about them for years, but it allowed us to establish ourselves as a band. The personal experiences that we put into 'We Live Here' have helped people get to know who we are, where we come from, why our worldview is what it is, how it is what it is, and why we are the way we are. And then this album lets us show a fuller, rounded view of our personality. We're able to have a little more fun with it because we don't have to be so serious with everything."
'The Price Of Life' peels back the curtain on Britain to show the country's true colours. Whether waging war on former leaders like Churchill and Thatcher, deconstructing the upper class's ideologies, or exploring socio-economic problems, they leave no stone unturned. They've worked up an interconnected multiverse, too. Like a conceptual social commentary, a single line in one song leads to the next one building an entire track around it. Take 'Health Is Wealth', which connects every concept the album captures in two and a half minutes and wraps it up with satirical wit
Whatever your world opinion, Bob Vylan know there's a long way to go, but it won't stop them - they'll keep fighting, one song at a time.
"We don't kid ourselves; it's crazy for us to expect things to all be done. Especially over the last few years where people have got ahead of themselves, they think everything's changed because we put the black square up and had a march, so everything's fine now," asserts Bobbie. "But this is generational; if it's been that long and things aren't fixed, the last two years aren't going to fix anything. We're under no illusion of how big a job it is to resolve a lot of these issues”.
To finish, it is worth dropping in a review of Bob Vylan’s new album. It has accrued a host of positive reviews and love from the press. NME gave their take on an album that, once heard, definitely remains with you and makes you think:
“The brooding, electro thrash of ‘Bait The Bear’ is a swaggering clap-back at all the hate Bob Vylan have faced for getting political, before they double down (“Wage war against the state / It’s a fascist regime”) while the rave-ready ‘Take That’ is a deliberately antagonistic anthem designed to make the “gammons feel sick now”.
There are no answers on ‘The Price Of Life’, just a passionate call for change and a desire to break the long-standing cycle of abuse. Yes, sometimes the references are a little dated (Churchill, Thatcher and Elvis all get a kicking) and the band aren’t exactly subtle – but they never claimed to be, either.
Elsewhere ‘Big Man’ and ‘Wicked And Bad’ might sound like your typical abrasive punk tracks on the surface, but underneath they tell true, vulnerable stories of trauma, survival and life or death decisions that people face everyday. The acoustic guitar-led ‘He Sold Guns’ takes it one step further, with the band taking influence from Pixies, Jamie T and The Verve to create something dangerously close to a ballad.
In every way, ‘Bob Vylan Presents: The Price Of Life’ is a far more eclectic record than anything the duo have released before. Their alt-rock tracks about inequality will speak to a wider audience but the band never soften their edges or pull their punches in a bid for accessibility. At times, it is extreme – just like the world we’re living in right now”.
Go and follow Bob Vylan and check out their music. A duo who will keep putting out such essential and thought-provoking music, they are among my favourite new/rising acts (even if they have been out there for a bit). With an acclaimed album under their belt this year, they will be hitting the road and bringing their amazing music to the people. If you do not know about Bob Vylan, then make their part of…
YOUR music rotation.
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