The Claim

It’s rare nowadays for the past’s cultural artefacts to be excavated with little fanfare. The reissue/repackage industrial complex has taken its time getting round to (re)assessing Kent’s The Claim.

Originally extant from 1985 – 1992 which saw the release of two LPs and the wonderfully titled EP ‘This Pencil Was Obviously Sharpened by a Left-Handed Indian Knife Thrower’. The Manic Street Preachers were devotees and the band are a clear (and acknowledged) influence on early Blur (traces of their work also seeps through Damon Albarn’s The Good, The Bad and the Queen). Flattery gets you everywhere.

With 1988 album ‘Boomy Tella’ (awarded ‘8/10’ in the NME) given the redux treatment earlier this year, appearing on CD for the first time, the foursome reconvene on ‘The New Industrial Ballads’, an album that picks up where they left off. Like The Band of Holy Joy and The Wolfhounds they are superb at articulating the minutiae and quirks of everyday existence framing seemingly individual concerns within a broader narrative.

Once part of the thriving ‘Medway Scene’ (c.f. Billy Childish, The Prisoners and The James Taylor Quartet) The Claim remain noble traditionalists that incorporate and integrate folk-tones, shamble-pop, jangle-rock and downright literate-lyricism across songs that encompass the labyrinthine neologism that is ‘Brexit’, the illusion of progress/the progress of illusion in the ‘Big Society’ (‘Hercules’), how changes in environment and as ‘time keeps marching on, we sing a different song’ (‘Light bending) all impact on the psyche.

Instrumental string-picking opener ‘Johnny Kidd's Right Hand Man’ is a pastoral nod to the one-eyed musical buccaneer and pioneering 60s rock and roller, the absence of words leaves the listener pondering just who his trusty foil was. The itinerant immigrant within us all flows through the jaunty ‘Journey’, which addresses the paths and roads everyone has had to navigate throughout history, ancestors of everyone once had to uproot and reroute, upheavals of place, history and identity that pervade today, as political malfeasance forces generations to seek pastures new in the face of hostility and fear.

‘30 Years’ (featuring Vic Templar from fellow Medway band The Dentists) is a follow-up to 1990’s ‘Mike the Bike’ (released on Bob “Saint Etienne” Stanley’s Caff label). Templar intriguingly recounts memories of yore contrasting a ‘dislike of plain chocolate’ to today’s portable gadget fetishisation that implies progress on one level yet at odds with the prevailing disparity and misery. It posts the question: how is progress measured?

‘The New Industrial Ballads’ is a triumphantly welcome and startling return to form and content, where time’s passage has neither condensed nor diluted their message.