Sleaford Mods are the type of band that force you to have an opinion on them within about five seconds of hearing their music. There are no half-measures, no stylistic arcs, no organic steps taken, no time at all to let it sink in and decide if this is something you might like. They’re a duo from Grantham in England, a place most famous for being the birthplace of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Singer Jason Williamson speed-talks bile while Andrew Fearn provides coarse backing tracks, which barely get beyond cheap plastic keyboard presets. They’ve already released a ton of music, most of which got nowhere, until last year’s Austerity Dogs, which gained rolling acclaim as a treatise on the State of Things in contemporary England. It might sound unlikely, but a man who frequently references toilet habits in songs has become one of the most sharp and funny chroniclers of his country's widespread slump into disillusionment.
Williamson has had a few attempts at getting somewhere in music before. “I used to be in bands, fuckin’ hated it” is the slogan on Sleaford Mods’ Bandcamp page. They’re a band of inherent contradiction, neither coming from the English town of Sleaford nor being mods, although Williamson’s appearance bears traces of a mod past. Instead, Divide and Exit is about as punk as punk gets in 2014. Williamson sounds charged, wired, determined to make one last go of things, simultaneously expressing his frustration at the helplessness of it all and finding his words taking him somewhere beyond his current predicament—a juxtaposition that could have fascinating implications for this band’s future. Sleaford Mods are playing sell-out shows in the UK, gaining blanket acclaim everywhere. Their next album, post audience expansion, should be interesting, especially as Williamson drops enough music industry references into his songs to suggest he’s got an astute grasp on how its machinations work.
Sleaford Mods songs follow a simple formula, repeated 14 times on Divide and Exit. Fearn triggers his economical music, allowing it to repeat until close, while Williamson gets lost in a blizzard of words, sometimes to the point of tripping over himself (on “Smithy”, about fashion designer Paul Smith, on this album). Profanity, jokes, and commentary come thick and fast, with Williamson often sounding like he’s in an argument with himself, or addressing someone whose identity forms around his words as the song progresses. There are cultural references that will mean nothing to many people outside the UK, most prominently on “Tiswas”, named after a kids’ TV show ("Tiswas") that ran from the mid 1970s to the early 80s. It barely matters because what makes Sleaford Mods work is a universal expression of exasperation, of finding yourself in a position where your ideals are trampled on so hard every day that it feels like society barely has a place for you.
Even the jokes and puns Williamson scatters through his songs form a particular function if you can dig past them as surface level chatter. They’re so poor, so lacking in laughs, that they resemble the kind of forced-grin jollity people put on when they’re at an absolute low, scrambling around for something, anything, to get them through the day. He hops from that kind of thinking to scathing critique in a heartbeat, calling out people who talk in fake regional accents on “Livable Shit” and then lambasting pointless nationalist loyalty in the same song (“St. George’s flag twat,” he growls). You can almost feel Williamson’s skin prickling in the places he goes to in these songs, some of which are outlined in unrelentingly grim terms. On “A Little Ditty” he rants about “gnarly coke-death faces, death death death, nine to a cubicle.” Of course, after such disturbingly lucid thinking, the song ends with a voice saying: “That was shit that end bit, mate.”
Some of the acts regularly mentioned in the same breath as Sleaford Mods include the Streets, the Fall, and English punk-poet John Cooper Clarke. There are traces of those artists here, but only dim ones in the overall picture. Instead, Sleaford Mods are tapping into a feeling the UK has traditionally found a more expressive home for in mediums other than music. Williamson has declared an admiration for the kitchen sink drama of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and his ceaseless depiction of a life marred by petty violence, discontent, and resentment resembles the work of filmmaker Alan Clarke, whose Scum and Made in Britain are chilling depictions of societal outcasts whose lives are caught in utter stasis. There’s a similar conviction to those works here—it’s difficult to imagine anyone else being able to pull off a line like “the state is no longer your voice” on “Under The Plastic And N.C.T.”, so convincing is the tenor in Williamson’s voice.
The crude nature of this music as a mode of overall expression, whether it’s in the unrelenting use of swearing or in Fearn’s cloddish rhythms, might be the most powerful tool this band has at its disposal, particularly in terms of making a connection to a bigger audience. Turner Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller recently exhibited pictures drawn by prisoners of the Iraq war, which depict the chief architects of the conflict, including Tony Blair and former UN weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly. The works are raw and technically poor, but the bitterness and hatred they express is overwhelming, illustrating how base feeling, when expressed with such belief, can overcome any window dressing put up around it. Where Sleaford Mods take their wonderfully foul-mouthed antagonism from here is anyone’s guess, but it scarcely matters when they’re so vividly depicting the now. Williamson’s been through a lot, and he knows the zeitgeist when he sees it. A recent tweet from Sleaford Mods succinctly sums up both the position they find themselves in and the feeling they reflect in their music: “This is our time.”
