Bob Vylan
‘Humble as The Solar’
(Ghost Theatre)
In these fractious instances, there aren’t any clear-cut strains, and the complexities are incendiary. It’s uncommon to seek out voices that reduce by the noise and make sense of the narrative. With a real anger, Bob Vylan has linked with the frayed edges of the sonic panorama with a clutch of releases and genuinely incendiary reside gigs and the third album finds new methods of getting the message throughout.
When Bob Vylan and his accomplice in grime Bobbie Vylan burst on the scene in a flurry of leopardskin, Crass T shirts and an ideal grime/punk combine they sounded and felt radical. The charismatic Bob fronted out audiences with a righteous anger and the combative presence of prime time old style punk as he handled the ‘isms’ and fault strains of the fashionable world.
The third album stretches the duo’s cloth even additional because it escapes from their very own potential straight jacket – a straight jacket that’s so rattling engaging. The album seems like a stroll by the mish-mash of recent tradition and the numerous avenue musics that pour out of bedsit home windows and automobile stereos like punk, grime, hip hop, rock, rap, lure, drum and bass and digital and even pop – all of the insurgent musics rolled into one.
Humble Because the Solar continues to be coping with the advanced points and politics of the fashionable world, and while a number of the tracks are nonetheless the punky hip hop get together, there may be some real musical nous creeping into the melee as proof that behind all of the physicality there’s a delicate melodic songwriter who’s getting the message throughout in subtler methods as a harbinger to a future.
Not that Bob has backed off from rubbing individuals up along with his selection of targets. There’s a real anger from rising up in an usually brutal society. The righteous rage of their 2020 debut, We Reside Right here, and it’s follow-up in 2022, The Worth Of Life, nonetheless exists. The albums had been snapshots from austerity Britain, the place rigidity was all over the place.
And nonetheless is.
The brand new album tackles all this with snapshots of the nervous breakdown of the now like on Starvation Video games that offers with the large gaps between wealthy and poor or the humour on He’s A Man that takes down poisonous masculinity with cute and humorous strains like ‘The G spot don’t exist man that’s simply feminist propaganda!’.
Usually an indignant band paints itself right into a nook however Bob Vylan had been at all times greater than blind rage. Taking the message to the plenty with out dropping the sting is the conundrum that the Bobs are coping with, and Humble As The Solar seems like the start of their subsequent journey…
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