There are no concessions to accessibility here, nor any suspicion that Wallers might ever moderate his darkest thoughts for the sensitive listener. It’s compiled from three exceedingly limited CDrs and tapes so strictly speaking it's not ‘new’, but it hangs together as a singular work with grand, grotty vision. Having retired that practice several years ago, nowadays Wallers most often performs solo as The Rebel, and has a new album, Poems With Water Trilogy, on Texan label Monofonus Press.
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Plus the excitingly lateral hypothesis, “If The Beatles were around today / They’d be bogus paramilitaries / They’d get a big East End send-off.” Poems With Water Trilogy by The RebelĪn incurable habit of muttering about arcane, lumpen British culture to a backing of unfriendly hissing clunk is not The Bomber Jackets’ exclusive pursuit – indeed, Ben Wallers was doing it first as vocalist in obscene garage rockers The Country Teasers. It’s all kept anchored to Realness by Walker – sounding indolent as ever, across the LP’s eight tracks he references Lovejoy, Jockey Slut, ‘pingers’, Levi Roots, Caesar The Geezer, Calippos, Biggins (presumably Christopher), The Wicker Man (as in, “he’s always going on about.”) and Tosh Lines (who has a song named after him). ‘All I Wanna Do Is Stay At Home’ has a sickly, resinous dub vibe that captures its title’s inertia. ‘Deranged Sauce Mum’ (a satisfying sequence of words to type) is an elegiac, oddly pretty thing lurched onward by a vocal loop redolent of early-90s proto-rave, except slowed down instead of sped up ‘Feed’ is like DJ Screw tackling OMD.
Its coupling of janky minimal synth beatscapes and glum, faintly wistful vocals is more accessible than Charcoal Owls, a Walker project who I reviewed two columns back, but no more likely to be played at Fabric. Kudos To The Bomber Jackets (Alter) is the second LP by the trio, who also feature Dan Bolger from another of Walker’s bands, The Pheromoans, and Sian Dorrer from dayglo-dressed Londoners Ravioli Me Away.
Get all my third-hand understanding of low-rent Britculture through the lyrics of Russell Walker and his band The Bomber Jackets, you say? Don’t mind if I do! Kudos To The Bomber Jackets by The Bomber Jackets The idea that some famous pop cultural figures might be avatars for 60 million or so people is objectively insulting, really, and although the impulse to make these kind of grand claims will probably never go away entirely, nowadays it’s easier – thanks to our technological means of consuming media – to just ignore these tools if you want to. As the thinkpieces on the 20th anniversary of Cool Britannia squelch into existence, perhaps we should reflect on how narcissistic, exclusionary and self-serving a concept it was. Parts of New Weird Britain are newer, weirder or more (audibly) British than others, but will any of them do the important job of ‘capturing the national mood’? Let me answer that question by insisting that you shoot me, with a gun, if I ever try to suggest that of anything. In any event, it will remain a broad tent, or a big church, which I hope the releases in this edition bear out.
New Weird Britain! Thanks to the efforts of The Quietus’ major dudes, it looks like the detritus covered in this column might have a name with a chance of sticking, which is cool because I always wanted to be at the vanguard of something that winds up dorks.
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