Sleaford Mods – Spare Ribs review

The world weary “Anger is an energy” quote might be true, but it only sustains creativity for so long. Thankfully – sort of – Britain’s political class continue to provide enough fuel to keep Andrew Fearn and Jason Williamson’s project flying to the moon and back, a show which has managed to sustain the pair through six albums of sometimes carefully judged, sometimes not polemical wordsmanship.

Spare Ribs is a lockdown album, a term which will hopefully look like a curious anachronism in two or three years time but for now channels the ever repeatable paranoia of the walls closing in squared with having way too much time on your hands to think about it. Out of this mess comes much good, however, the duo edging musically ever closer to the grown up mainstream without sacrificing the double-barelled invective; this time some of the worthy targets are class tourists, former government advisors and the bigotry that festers in small towns.

On their last couple of releases it’s been obvious that Williamson has been looking for ways to escape some of the constraints of his own sucessful formula, but struggling for inspiration. The game changer though has finally arrived with the recruitment of Amy Taylor of Amyl And The Sniffers and Billy Nomates (AKA Tor Maries) to add vocals on Nudge It and Mork N’ Mindy respectively. They’re his personal highlights, offering a kick to re-energise Sleaford Mods for the twenties. In them, Spare Ribs in part at least throws forward to a time when rage might not need be fuel for everything.

You can read the full review here.