SLEAFORD MODS - Spare Ribs - LP

New album ‘Spare Ribs’ (their sixth album proper as a duo, but 11th when you count deeper cuts) was recorded in a three-week window between lockdowns last year. “And we’re all so Tory-tired / And beaten by minds small,” frontman Jason Williamson sing-speaks on experimental intro track ‘A New Brick’, summing up the fatigue of living too long under a dark Conservative cloud. The album title, Williamson has explained, comes from “the idea of the amount of people that died from the first wave of coronavirus; human lives are always expendable to the elites… We’re in a constant state of being spare ribs”. That said, the album does not see them buckle under all the gloom. While rooted in the everyday fury and monotony of what we’ve all had to endure, there’s a lot more light and variety on here than anything that the Nottingham duo have ever put to tape before.