Sleaford Mods - Divide And Exit (10Th Anniversary Edition)

Released: 26/07/2024

The reissue of the seventh album by the mighty Nottingham duo sounds as vital as ever, and for my money features some of the best lyrics frontman Jason Williamson has spat forth. Take this opening salvo from Tied Up in Nottz', a hypnotic ESG-like stormer: The smell of piss is so strong / It smells like decent bacon / Kevin's getting footloose on the overspill Under the piss-station / Two pints destroyer on the cobbled floors / No amount of whatever is gonna chirp the chip up / It's The Final Countdown,' by fuckin' Journey / I woke up with shit in my sock outside the Polish off-licence. As an East-Midlander myself, I feel very seen.

A kind of cross between Mark E. Smith and the late, great Leeds poet Tony Harrison, whose epic anti-fascist poemV, written during the 1984“1985 miners' strike, is one of the most coruscating literary works ever penned (sample: The prospects for the present aren't too grand  / when a swastika with NF (National Front)'s / sprayed on a grave, to which another hand / has added, in a reddish colour, CUNTS.), many have rightly waxed lyrical about Williams' writing, but the role of the quiet man' of the band, Andrew Fearn (the Chris Lowe to Williams' Neil Tennant, if you will) cannot be overstated, and the music onDivide and Exitis some of the best of Sleaford Mods' career “ sublime minimal, bass-heavy electro post-punk coiled tight as a spring that rarely has time for such bourgeois notions as choruses or melodic top lines, and is all the better for it.