SLEAFORD MODS - UK GRIM

Released: 10/03/23

There are so many things I love about Sleaford Mods, not least (as a fellow East-Midlander) vocalist Jason Williamson’s lovely Notts accent, with which such words as ‘conformity’ and ‘lovely’ are transmuted into ‘conformuteh’ and ‘luvleh’. Actually, simply calling Williamson a vocalist is doing him a disservice, for he’s really a poet; not in the eye-rolling way that the Monarchy-shilling Simon Armitage is a poet, but in the Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen sense – where, in the words of Robert Graves, “To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”

Other things to love: on new album UK Grim, Florence Shaw from Dry Cleaning’s vocal on ‘Force 10 from Navarone’ contains the Burroughsian lines, “Fucking viral, fucking batman video you fucking moron / Why don't you phone up, spine bend, legs sync, scooter club / Shit smell, that's my road kill hat, don't touch it”; and the guest turn from Jane’s Addiction and Porno for Pyros' Perry Farrell on “So Trendy’, which is a sentence that I just wrote about a Sleaford Mods album. That these radically different forces of nature connected with each other – one a multi-platinum alt-rock star, and the apotheosis of LA music-scene decadence; the other a majestically angry bloke from Nottingham – is kind of remarkable; but then, Sleaford Mods are a remarkable band, and UK Grim is the duo’s finest album yet.