The first thing that hits you when listening to The Blinders' second album Fantasies of a Stay at Home Psychopath is the self-confidence, the sheer unapologetic, intoxicating arrogance – Manchester has known nothing like it since Zlatan Ibrahimovic left Old Trafford.
And much like the towering Swedish striker, ("Zlatan doesn't do auditions") everything the band surveys becomes their empire – just as it did when they burst onto the scene two years ago with debut album Columbia, Brexit Britain in all its nosediving glory belongs to them.
And much like the towering Swedish striker, ("Zlatan doesn't do auditions") everything the band surveys becomes their empire – just as it did when they burst onto the scene two years ago with debut album Columbia, Brexit Britain in all its nosediving glory belongs to them.
Ripping through a sound rooted in the time-honoured tradition of thrashing the shit out of guitars in a garage, but toughened by dissatisfaction and that hard-headed self-belief, in some ways the Blinders are the yin to IDLES' yang. The Mancunians tackle social issues head-on and wear their politics proudly on their sleeve (frontman Thomas Haywood has performed with a guitar with the exquisite slogan "fuck the Tories" written on it), but while the IDLES sound is fraught and chaotic, the Blinders go for a much more eclectic approach which has earned them the tag of 'punkadelic'.
Opening track 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' is a great example of this, stomping and swirling in equal measure – a mid-paced punk track on the surface but with textures and flavours unfurling like oil in water below, and the swaggering, Trump-baiting single 'Lunatic With a Loaded Gun' is also ever so slightly stoned. Things get undeniably heated on the no-holds-barred thrasher 'Forty Days and Forty Nights', and kick with blunt-force riffs like Royal Blood on 'Mule Track', but these straight-ahead cuts are actually in the minority here.
While latest single 'Black Glass' might end up an urgent punk rocker, it spends most of its time in an almost free-form jam state dealing with what Haywood describes as "a disturbed introvert's conversation between him and himself, whose need for isolation has reached its peak", and elsewhere the tempo drops off for sleazy blues-inspired joints like 'Circle Song' and 'I Want Gold'. Despite all the sonic ground covered there is only one true misstep, the jarring 'Interlude' which seems to serve little or no purpose (or perhaps we're just missing the point).
But we can forgive the band two minutes of self-indulgence when they have provided another 40 of some of the most blistering yet intelligent post-punk of the year – no mean feat in 2020.
Words - Joe Ponting