Review Summary: ...
‘Music for the People’ – Before even listening to the album the title infuriated me. Tom Clarke and co think that because they’ve been signed and because they’ve released a few albums that all of a sudden they can become crusaders for the British working-class. Although, if you believed Clarke’s massively over-exaggerated view of the repressed and hopeless working class, in which ‘the only excitement’s a supermarket sweep’, you’d probably hail this album as a classic, but being British and working class, I often found myself only focusing on the lyrical content and the clichés Clarke spouts at every available opportunity. It’s phrases like ‘welcome to England where there is no love’ that make this album a ridiculous, egotistical flop.
It’s a shame really, as musically this album isn’t bad, with some pretty good rock songs in its midst. The only problem with this being that instead of trying to make anything unique, The Enemy seem quite content to just lift songs off other British bands, change them ever-so-slightly, drown them in pretension and call them their own. In some cases I found it hard to believe that they had actually got away with it. The opening song on the album is the rapturous ‘Elephant Song’, and positive start to a disappointing album. It’s a bawling rock song, driven by harmonica. Clarke still manages to squeeze some of his substandard lyrics in towards the end, but overall, it’s a good song. However, I had to keep checking that I wasn’t listening to ‘The Swamp Song’ by Oasis, as the similarities were unbelievable. But, I was optimistic, and this song was actually followed up by another quite decent song ‘No Time For Tears’. Beginning with sharp piano and crashing drums, it goes on to be quite a good song, nothing classic or anything, but it does the job; it’s just average. It really says something about the quality of the album in which one of the stand out tracks is ‘just ok’, where as if ‘No Time For Tears’ had been in their debut album, it would have been one of the worse songs.
The next song ‘51st State’ is possibly one of the worst on the album, although quite frankly there’s a lot of competition. It’s just a generic, charm less protest song, in which Clarke declares that Britain is the 51st state of America ‘where democracy has failed’. One of my major issues with this album is that Clarke is 24 years old! Who does he think he is? I think that Clarke favours himself as the next Paul Weller, yet so far all he as done is made a mockery of the music that Weller pioneered. The album does pick up slightly with the next song ‘Sing When You’re in Love’, what sounds at first to be a pleasant, mushy love song, but again ends up with Clarke trying to hold modern Britain to rights. One of the lines ‘Sing to yourself and the bottom of a glass’ stood out, as I understood it as a reference to alcoholism, something I’m sure Clarke had a lot of experience with during his time at school, only a few years back. He tries to speak like he’s spent forty years in the gutter and he’s decided to rise up and fight for his people, and all he sounds like is a self-righteous student and a self-appointed messiah.
The next song of any interest, ‘Be Somebody’ is again, quite good musically. It’s upbeat, cheerful and catchy and has all the makings of a really great song. One thing The Enemy seem to do really well, is blend piano and guitar together into great pop songs, and this song epitomizes that. But once again, and I know I must sound like a parrot, but he spouts his dreadful lyrics all over it, saying ‘The only thing that’s really true about life is that the older you get, the more you compromise’. It’s sad that Clarke seems to have an obsession with singing about things he knows nothing about, as I’ve already highlighted, he’s 24 years old, yet he thinks he can come out with lines like ‘There ain’t no future in British steel’ and get respect, when he wasn’t even a glint in his father’s eye when the British steel industry started it’s rapid decline.
The only other song worth listening to, and by far the best song on the album is ‘Keep Losing’ the penultimate track. It’s gentle, melodic and the lyrics, whilst still aggravating, are bearable. It starts of with acoustic guitar and Clarke giving a good vocal performance, followed by well-executed strings and organs. The chorus is fantastic; tender and sweet and surprisingly quite provocative. The only problem with this song is that it’s quite blatantly a complete rip-off of Pink Floyd. It sounds as if it’s been airlifted from ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ so outrageously, it’s shocking to think that a band can get any kind of success by just stealing other bands sounds. Never the less, it’s a very good song, the best on the album and possibly the best they have ever done. But really, this is a pretty terrible album. Musically, there’s lots of potential, even if a lot of it is from other artists; lyrically, it’s one of the worst albums of all time. Maybe I’m over-exaggerating how bad they are because I find them offensive, that Clarke thinks he as the right to label an entire generation as having no future, simply because he feels he is apart of it. Instead of creating something new and fresh, which I firmly believe they could do, The Enemy seem content to just re-hash and re-use sounds already perfected by other bands, and cover them in pompous preachings and shameless hyperbole. So in conclusion, don’t listen to this album. Listen to Pink Floyd and The Jam and all the other bands they’ve ripped off instead.
Highlights: Keep Losing; Elephant Song
