Cabbage

As the fossilised Britpop baggage handlers attract on and offline opprobrium from the twittering masses for their desperate acts of sledgehammered product-placing vanity projects … erm, I mean rock trope rebellion … and the boorish, beerish, garish antics of discharged battery men like Mr. Kasabian have hit the paydust, over the last few years a new kind of ‘lad’ rock has entered the fray. Casting aside the shackles and hackles of the raucous four-pint action men there’s finally a new sensibility in town.

Groups like Sleaford Mods have given voice and expression to the middle aged trapped in societal strait jackets and disaffected dead-enders everywhere, IDLES have cornered the age of Ballardian simmering inter-class rage and The Fat White Family have provided the absurdist hedonism with a subversive glint. Cerebral caustic as a razor-sharp Mancunian once opined.

To this mix Tameside’s Cabbage have added lit-crit classical observations, humorous barbs and political polemics to warm the cockles of any good pacifist-socialist. Debut album 2018’s ‘Nihilistic Glamour Shots’ contained the excoriating blame and shame-throwing finger-pointing ‘Arms of Pleonexia’ which takes aim at war-mongering arms-sellers.

If that album showcased the ensemble’s raw inlook and roar outlook, then follow-up ‘Amanita Pantherina’ (named after a mushroom/fungus, make of that what you must) ramps up the amps and overlays the fuzz-scuzz with added underbelly laughs and top under asides.

In a similar vein to the recently resurgent I Like Trains album, Cabbage deftly draw from an array of inspirations and influences deliciously dipping into Earl Brutus’s electrofried drunk-funk glam-dram on ‘Direct-Dictate’ which is pure beauty and the beast; a serrated spinal-chord vibrates with a cooed chorus that will melt the choreographed cynicism from any stuck-in- the mud-mad-for-it moron.

‘Medicine’ adeptly adopts and adapts The Stranglers’ Gnostic malevolence of 60s psych-punk Nuggets with a nagging and snagging synthline straight from the late Dave Greenfield’s copybook. A Jean-Jacques Burnelesque rumbling bassline surreptitiously stalks the shadows of the waltzing, whirling dervish sonics. The bitter-sweet choir of ire ‘Hatred’ features some gorgeous George Harrisonish wah-wah wailing guitar.

Elsewhere, Pixies ‘Bossa Nova’ era meets Swell Maps’ scratchwork on ‘You’ve made an art form (from falling to pieces)’; Shaun Ryder’s stream of (un)conscious ramblings are consciously channelled on the trippy ‘Get outta my brain’; ‘Piles of smiles evokes Alice Cooper’s usage of West Side Story’s ‘Jet Song’ from 1972’s ‘Schools’ Out’ album. Menace and malevolence, it’s a macabre cabaret of multiple luminosities.

Watch out world, Cabbage are watching YOU!