Album Review: Half Man Half Biscuit - "The Voltarol Years"

 

Maybe the ultimate cult band, it's somewhat reassuring to know that fifteen albums into their career, Wirral indie veterans Half Man Half Biscuit remain their usual scathingly sarcastic selves. With song titles like Tess Of The Dormobiles, Persian Rug Sale At The URC and Token Covid Song, it really couldn't be anyone other than HMHB really.

If there's an overriding theme on The Voltarol Years then, as the album title suggests, it's the onset of middle age and the depressing realisation that death is creeping up on you. The fact that it starts with I'm Getting Buried In The Morning, an ode to a murderer being sent to the electric chair, is telling and the likes of Big Man Up Front, dealing with a hit and run accident, the self-explanatory Beneath This Broken Headstone and the reflective closer Oblong Of Dreams which seems to be talking about a dying man's last moments.

Yet there's still plenty of room for Half Man Half Biscuit's trademark scabrous humour in here - In A Suffolk Ditch is an ode to leaving the bodies of Kelvin McKenzie and Nicholas Witchell in sacks in the aforementioned location while Midnight Mass Murder is an ode to lower league football akin to the classic Friday Night And The Gates Are Low.

With Mark E Smith sadly now no longer with us, it's good to see the north west's other infamous group of veteran indie curmudgeons still going strong and The Voltarol Years is proof that despite the fixation on more morbid topics, they've still got plenty of life left in them. A good album for both long time fans and those who are just getting started on their voyage of discovery of this rather awesome and unique band.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

Image
  "I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..."  - The Quireboys  - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was  aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You  on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled  on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

Image
  "You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?"  - Silverfish  - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split.  I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth  and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
Read more

Album Review: Ming City Rockers - "Lime"

Image
  Hailing from Immingham near Grimsby (hence their name), the Ming City Rockers briefly looked like quite hot property a few years ago with their debut self-titled album being a prime slice of howled smalltown angst which picked them up enough plaudits to get Steve Albini in to produce the follow-up, 2016's  Lemon . And then...nothing. Seven years on from that sophomore effort and the group have returned, slimmed down to a three-piece and with a very noticeable change to their image. But the sound is very much the same with the sort of angry three-chord garage punk that made their debut such a good effort. The change seems to be that Lime  sees the Ming City Rockers taking their worldview out of the smalltowns and over to the nation as a whole. The sarky lead off single Jill Was An Anarchist  was a definite marker laid down and there's plenty more on Lime  where that came from such as the snarling Poor Old Jim  taking a swipe at alcoholic F*r*ge-supporting boomers ( "He us
Read more