Jason Williamson's speaking voice is gloriously bilious: hoarse with fury, spraying plosives everywhere, turning up the kinked corners of his East Midlands accent as far as they'll go, cramming syllables into every line because nobody's going to fooken shut him up, mate. It's the cornerstone of Sleaford Mods' sound, underscored by double-tracking on crucial phrases; the music behind it is loops made by Andrew Fearn, the other half of the band, mostly from blunt basement-rock bass and drums. (On stage, the two of them are a delightful contrast: Williamson burning-eyed and venting, Fearn hanging back with a beer in his hand, bobbing his head and not even pretending to do more than press the start button at the beginning of each song.)
Williamson and Fearn are both weary-looking white guys in their mid-forties, and they've been kicking around the music world long enough to not have an iota of idealism about it. The title of *Key Markets—*something between Sleaford Mods' third album and their ninth, depending on how you count—refers to a '70s-era supermarket, but it's also a canny reference to the way the band has been clawing its way up in the British music scene. It's been less than a year since Williamson was able to quit his day job as a "benefits adviser," which provided the raw material for both their best-known older song, "Jobseeker", and the new album's "Face to Faces": "Free money, mate, just fill in the form and if you can't then I can 'elp ya."
The state of a working class that politics have kicked in the face over and over is the central subject of Williamson's topical, allusive, syllable-drunk lyrics. His mocking rants spool out like bog roll yanked by a cat, occasionally rhyming, miraculously snapping into sync with Fearn's beats. "Miliband got hit with the ugly stick, not that it matters/ The chirping cunt obviously wants the country in tatters," Williamson spits on "In Quiet Streets"; it's not quite Eminem-caliber for either invective or internal rhyme, and it arrives two months after Ed Miliband resigned as Leader of the Labour Party, but it'll do. (Likewise, you need to have a fairly deep knowledge of both British politics and Britpop to parse a couplet from "Rupert Trousers": "Idiots visit submerged villages in 200-pound wellies, spitting out fine cheese made by that tool from Blur/ Even the drummer’s a fuckin' MP: fuck off, you cunt, sir.")
Sometimes Williamson sings, after a fashion, which is where Key Markets gets weird, in much the same way that early Fall records got weird when Mark E. Smith tried to carry a tune. (The creepily catchy "Tarantula Deadly Cargo", which may or may not be a scatological joke, would fit right in on the Fall's Dragnet, especially Fearn's asthmatic guitar plinks.) "No One's Bothered" is another sung one, the closest thing here to the form of the '70s punk that's deeply embedded in Sleaford Mods' art, and it's built on a smart trick from Fearn. His rhythm track is a three-minute extension of a punk song's bolting bass-and-drums intro, a loop of the few seconds before the guitar inevitably dives in—which it never does here. "You're trapped? Me too," Williamson snaps. "Alienation? No one's bothered." The punk rock on which Williamson and Fearn grew up promised a lot of catharses that weren't actually forthcoming, so they don't even hint at those. But they've adopted its raw elements—crudity, spittle, black humor and unpretty voices—as durable tools to express discontent.
