Pound Land: Violence

Perched up in my local with headphones donned and the brain fuel of Carling, several locals persist (perhaps rightly) to give me daggers given my ‘do not disturb’ insolence. With the soundtrack being Pound Land’s latest cut, Violence, the irony is fierce, for suddenly I feel like one of the many hapless cunts that dominate their songs.

It’s a funny game this life business, and Pound Land only know too well. Undeniable social provocateurs, while the Sleaford Mods comparisons will arrive thick and fast, Adam Stone and Nick Harris have swiftly moved away from the sprechgesang dullards that have blunted the perilous kitchen utensils the ’Mods have wielded for the last 15 years.

Pound Land operate closer to the fault lines. Margins within margins in fact, with danger at a premium. On Violence, the addition of bassist Richard Lamell, drummer Steve Taylor, and saxophonist Jo Stone, sees Pound Land take the sharp turn of phrases inspired by X-Ray Spex and deliver them with Godflesh-like nihilism. It also catapults them as the best band within the M60 Ring Road.

As far as those aforementioned fault lines are concerned, still within the confines of this spit and sawdust milieu, halfway through my pint, and it’s evident that this is fertile ground to talk Violence. The album and not the looming threat from across the bar, of course…

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After all, Pound Land have created their own war zone and it starts with Programmed – a blistering, cacophony of saxophones and bass weight struggling through the mire of the themes that underpin the song. “Is this evolution? Programmed to be a cunt?”  and “It’s hard not to lose your shit / When the idiots are in charge” snarls Stone with gun barrel militancy as those with “personalised number plates” and glossy “manicured talons” cop the relevant spray of Pound Land venom.

It’s one of the best songs the band has written, feeding into this rolling hell of modern-day marketing and “comms” centred on reality being crushed by emotion. A shunning of the truth in favour of amplified fiction. Essentially, it’s the birth of alternative facts – the prize awarded to the loudest with reality rendered as obsolete. This new litany of sleepwalking mass culture, or in Stone’s words, “certified morons”, spawned from the pits of Twitter meltdowns and Instagram voyeurism; together they will buy anything they are told if it fits the narrative.

And it continues on The Last Sufferer, as Stone screams “What you say / Every day is a fucking a chore”. Like a scene unfolding outside the smoking area of Wetherspoons, it’s backed with Harris’ withering bunker sonics that excavator deeper into the social malaise. And speaking of, Six Inch is like rotted flesh that has been grinded into 30-year-old, thread-bare carpet (“In a dirty flat / Stinking, freezing / Not enough of vodka”).

Then there’s New Labor, which occupies the other end of the spectrum. The protagonist, once working class now a “self-made” individual that has been the low hanging fruit for the Tories and the fallacy of capitalism; a selfishness that grows as fast as the bank balance and ego. A Farage disciple in yet another canard: Brexit.

Deep in the fleapit of noise-rock comes Fucking Joke (“Didn’t they tell ya / They took away your future” and the lamentable assault of Media Amnesia, as Stone parts with more poignancy (“Some bomb’s gone off in a foreign country / Relax you won’t remember any of this next week / You’re too busy being spending your life a fucking sleep”).

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Feedback ravaged and beaten down with paranoia, Low Health is like a storm cloud from hell. Inventive as ever, through the lens of an elderly person, it’s vintage Pound Land, who turn the song into an abstract nightmare, “Located near junction 5 of the M1”.

The misery ends with Violence Part 2. A dead-eyed dirge rising like bile from the mouth of society. Here Pound Land frame the horror and discontent like very few have. The point where our health system feels beyond repair. The point where the environment erodes. The point where artistic expression is viewed as something as superficial a lampshade from IKEA. Unless you’re an empty suit executive in financial services or some knobhead influencer ignorant to facts and enamoured by fiction, then the future looks rather primitive indeed. Pound Land harness the havoc in something snarky and sinister. Something positively punk.

They have been moving towards something as defining as this since last year’s Can’t Be Arsed. With a swathe of releases that followed, the follow-up LP, Defeated, and the withering singles compilation that underlined their current fruitful period, it’s all brought about by an underlying friction between hard work and discontent; the two constantly overriding each other, and on Violence it reaches boiling point.

Violence is everything its title suggests. A band firing on all cylinders in what is not only one of the greatest releases under the Cruel Nature stable. It’s up there with the year’s greatest releases, period.

Violence is out Friday via Cruel Nature Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.