Working Men's Club - Working Men's Club - VINYL LP

Liz DeBiase - Loop [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/27/2004

Here to bust out of Doledrum, clad in a t-shirt that screams InchSOCIALISMInch and armed with drum machine, synth, pedal and icy stare are Working Men's Club. Named after the wood paneled, community-run venues 18-year-old band leader and singer Sydney Minsky-Sargeant used to sneak into under age. It was at home in the town of Todmorden in West Yorkshire, feeling hemmed in, that Syd first began assembling these ten songs. InchThere's not much going on, not much stuff to do as a teenager,Inch he says. InchIt's quite isolated. And it can get quite depressing being in a town where in the winter it gets light at nine in the morning and dark at four.Inch Their eponymous 2020 debut was equal parts Calder Valley restlessness and raw Sheffield steel, as it was across the Pennines that Working Men's Club's hard edged electronic sound was forged under the watchful ear of producer Ross Orton (The Fall, M.I.A., Arctic Monkeys). This 12Inch collects remixes of their stand alone single, InchXInch.

Songs created in the shadow of terror and loss, but that crackle and pop with defiance, wrestled into being over one of the most extra-ordinary years in recent history. This is Fear Fear, a record made for agitating and dancing, for heart and soul, for here, now and tomorrow. The complete vision, that top-to-bottom rigour, is what makes the second album from Working Men's Club such a stunning and totally unique achievement. InchThe title summarises a mood that's been around for 18 months - and, in fact, for a lot longer. There's a miserable kind of war that's going on. People are scared of things aside from coronavirus. It documents time during lockdown to an extent, but it isn't just about that,Inch he explains. InchThe first album was mostly a personal documentation lyrically, this is a blur between personal and a third-person perspective of what was going on.Inch Making the busy feel finessed and the dreadful feel magical - Fear Fear manages those feats, and then some. Or, as Syd Minksy-Sargeant puts it InchWe just set out to make the best-sounding album we could.Inch