It’s all beginning to wear very thin indeed. Ten years ago this already addled Nottinghamshire duo captured the attention with bellowed, caustic and often astute observations delivered in an ur-rap monotone above cheapo punky laptop beats. The message then, humorously enough, was: everything is shit. Total shit. You’re shit, I’m shit, the country’s shit.
This briefly entertaining and frequently obscene working-class nihilism was gratefully received by a music press that, desperately looking for something ‘edgy’, found itself confronted by the mimsy and anodyne public-school folk of Mumford & Sons and Stornoway and Laura Marling. Fair enough: it was, for a while, enlivening and a certain kind of antidote. But, you have to say, with a rapidly diminishing sense of return over the following eight albums.
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