Review Summary: A perfectly dignified posthumous document for a band that deserved to have existed at a more favourable time.
In the music world, some artists achieve worldwide megastardom, attaining recognition and selling out venues wherever they go; others manage to build a respectable career, with perhaps not quite as widespread a level of fame, but with enough fans to warrant continuing on with their activity; some attain local notoriety, building a fanbase in and around their place of origin, and earning a reputation as one of that area's best kept secrets; and some fail to even make it that far, despite owing nothing in quality or effort to other, more famous acts. In short, musical fame is a lottery, and some bands are simply born to lose.
One such band were Wales' The Blocked, a mid-90s band-out-of-time on the verge of becoming lost from memory. Born at a time when the Internet was only just taking its first, incipient steps, the Newport power-trio were never anywhere near famous enough to justify more than a couple of articles in local, hard-copy newspapers and magazines; as such, it stands to reason that, a quarter of a century after their heyday and with physical media dwindling away to extinction, the group has nearly completely faded from public consciousness – if they were even ever there in the first place. Looking up 'The Blocked band' in a search engine in late 2020 turns up a single news article, while adding the title of their one and only full-length to the group's name only leads to a roll call of places where said album can be listened to or bought. Adding 'Welsh band' turns up two Facebook posts, and anyone looking for information on their discography had better be armed with the titles of at least a couple of their songs.
And yet, there was no discernible reason for The Blocked to have been
this low-key, even within their own community; much to the contrary, the band was loud, brash, and – as even a noncommittal spin of
Smashed Hits shows - certainly talented enough to have made a name for themselves outside of their local South Wales enclave.
The reason why this was not the case may have had to do with the group being around in the wrong decade; one rather suspects that, had The Blocked been active two decades before their birth, they would have been one of the biggest Welsh acts of their time. The group's upbeat, jingly-jangly, guitar-driven sound – described by frontman Jason Channing in the liner notes as
'progressive power-pop' - would have been right at home in the British rock scene of the late 1970s; coming about smack in the middle of the jaded, murky, alt-rock friendly mid-90s, however, it found itself two decades late to the original gravy train, and five to ten years too early for the next movement it might have fit into, the so-called 'post-punk revival'. The inevitable result of these unfavourable conditions was a near-total lack of interest on the part of both major labels and general audiences, condemning The Blocked to the ever-increasing ranks of the music world's
'never-were's.
And yet, the group did very little to deserve this fate; much to the contrary, in fact. The songs on
Smashed Hits are competent, if derivative slabs of 70s punk-pop, along the same sonic lines as the 'happier' bands in the spectrum. Quite where Channing got the
'progressive part from is unclear, but the frontman got the rest of the description spot-on – The Blocked's sound definitely does fit into the confines of 'power-pop'.
Released nearly a decade after the group's demise,
Smashed Hits is nominally a compilation album, but actually closer to a debut full-length effort. Gathering together twelve of the group's fifteen completed songs – of which one,
Flags, is still in the demo stage – it offers a good overview of what the band and their sound were all about, serving as a perfectly dignified posthumous document for a band that deserved to have existed at a more favourable time.
Opener
Keep Your Hands Off Felicity - the group's second-best-known song – may initially give off the wrong impression, positioning The Blocked as little more than a Buzzcocks worship act. The tropes are all there, from the melodically edgy riffs to the bouncy rhythm section, to Channing's dead-on impersonation of 'Cocks frontman Pete Shelley. It does not take long, however, for this notion to be dispelled, as the two subsequent songs show there is more to the group's sound than the carbon copy of a single influence. Follow-up
Kid Gloves defies listener expectations by slowing down the tempo and introducing a harmonica, with the end result sounding like a cross between an Undertones mid-tempo and an early Ramones ballad, before
Happy Families – The Blocked's one and only single back in the day – ramps up the snottiness and aggression, encroaching into Stiff Little Fingers territory - an influence revisited on the intro riff of follow-up
Plastic Punks and on the title of
Anger From Ulster (though not in the song itself). In both cases, however, the similarities are never anywhere near as overt as they were on
Felicity, allowing the songs (and the band) to stand or fall on their own merits.
The rest of the album's cuts follow along these same lines, all the while throwing in the odd additional influence -
Chocolate and Water and
Flags evoke The Clash, while the intro riff to
Louder Than London actively foreshadows the post-punk revival movement, with its playful guitar lead and
'do-dododo' vocal harmonies. The base sound, however, never strays too far from what the initial salvo of songs set up, resulting in a markedly consistent album with a few clear-cut stand-outs, but very little by way of weaker tracks. Even when the latter do appear, they are more anonymous than actively bad, mostly suffering from a lack of the sort of clearly defined chorus that makes the rest of the songs on this album so readily memorable.
The best examples of this trend are
Plastic Punks and
Anger From Ulster, an unfortunate back-to-back pairing which creates a slight dip in quality just as the album had got going; elsewhere,
Summer Loves You is a sub-two-minute draft of an idea for a song, while
Louder Than London fails to live up to its catchy intro lead, even despite boasting a stronger chorus than the remaining examples on this list.
Fortunately, these (slightly) weaker points are more than made up for by the rest of the album, which ranges from good to great. Every other song on this album has
something to make it memorable, be it an innovative approach (on
Kid Gloves or the semi-acoustic, Green Day-esque
Don't Let Love Break Your Heart) a tongue-in-cheek attempt at sounding fittingly sneery (on standout
Happy Families), a witty line (
'like birds of a feather flying in different directions') or simply a catchy verse or chorus section, like on absolute standout
Clodhopper and late-album highlight
Bird In A Cage – the kind of songs that stick in the listener's brain for days after a mere couple of plays. This results in a pleasingly consistent and consistently pleasant listening experience, making the album's already short 39-minute runtime seem even shorter, and inviting plenty of repeat spins.
In the end, then, it is hard not to feel sorry for The Blocked, a band who, while nowhere near as cool or rebellious as they would like listeners to believe, nevertheless deserved to have been at least a backup player in the 90s British alt-rock scene, or even better, the British 70s punk/power-pop scene; as it was, however. circumstances dictated that the group's only readily available document would be released long after their demise. Even still, a posthumous document is better than no document at all – and in that respect,
Smashed Hits is as good a eulogy as the peppy power-trio could have hoped for.
Recommended Tracks
Keep Your Hands Off Felicity
Happy Families
Clodhopper
Bird In A Cage
