BOB VYLAN - Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life

The entire sonic and sociopolitical outlook of London's Bob Vylan – two Bobs armed with guitar, drums, beats and a microphone, and a brilliant moniker meant to be pronounced “villain” – is captured in a pair of singles released in 2020, back when no record label or radio station wanted anything to do with racism, unemployment, sky-high rents and systemic poverty. If “We Live Here” was a punk/metal slash torn apart by a grime vocal delivery raspy enough to make Napalm Death blush, “England’s Ending” ventured into Uk hip-hop territory, alternating razor-sharp spoken word with aggressive toasting pitched at the highest octave. But it was undoubtedly the lyrics that got them banned, forcing the duo to self-release an Ep deemed too radical by everyone in the music business – spitting on the Union Jack in a way worthy of the old “Crass not Clash” days: not watered-down, Instagram-friendly social commentary, then, but genuine physical assaults on the conservatism of British society. The empire is gone, and any definition of “Englishness” can't ignore the Windrush generation, the curry houses or Brick Lane: Bob Vylan, athletic black blokes who answered violence with equal violence, were there to drive the point home – “We didn’t appear out of thin air/ we live here”.

It's hardly surprising that such extremism erupted from the suburban social fabric of a country that, perhaps more than any other in the West, has suffered the consequences of right-wing, antisocial policies, and which, precisely for that reason, has seen post-punk, industrial, rave culture and hardcore continuum rise, flourish and die in succession. And indeed it only takes a few verses of "Wicked & Bad", right at the opening of the new "Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life", for Margaret Thatcher's name to surface: as irresistible punk distortions churn away in a late-Nineties jungle club, the master of ceremonies invites listeners to dig up her grave and ask her where the milk went - a reference that's fairly obscure for those of us watching the island from a certain distance, pointing to a measure under the Heath government, which in 1971 scrapped free milk in school canteens. The effect is guaranteed, but the fuse for the whole record is hidden in another line: "Dog eat dog world/ but the dogs have gone mad"; true to form, Bob Vylan raise the stakes even further and crank the volume dial up to eleven, on a full-length that, in thirty-four minutes, pushes their musical approach to the extreme and makes the lyrics' edges even sharper.

That "The Price Of Life" isn't waving any white flags but gearing up for war is clear from the very start: the first words you hear are from a speech by Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian and activist assassinated in 1980 - more relevant than ever: "People in their day-to-day lives will know what it means to be living in a state of economic crisis". From there on, one assault follows another without a break, rage the only glue holding together seemingly irreconcilable sonic fault lines: the trumpet and reggae upbeats of "Health Is Wealth" collide with the hardcore acceleration of "Big Man", clearly bearing the marks of the Bad Brains hurricane as it passed through; the instant anthem "Take That" lifts the riff from 808 State's "Cubik" to lay a formidable rap over it, while certain passages of "Turn Off The Radio", "GDP" or "Bait The Bear" betray some not entirely recommendable nu-metal listening habits.

It has to be said: the energy is impressive, but in some cases such a bare-bones self-production doesn't let the tracks shine as much as they could, and the sound setup drifts into the generic. Pure talent, and even flashes of genius, are to be found here in Bobby's barrage of invective rather than in Bobbie's grooves.

Unleashed by a flow that's as elusive as it is precise (you'll be amazed at how intelligible the breath-held growl on "Drug War" is), the killer rhymes of "The Price Of Life" tell of the apocalypse of a society of the drowned with no saved, where brutal bluntness seems the only possible response to a politics that has abdicated any vision of collective progress in favour of the free market. To stage it, Bobby - with sarcasm, awareness and sheer skill - borrows concepts and vocabulary from an evidently vast library, but also from the entire history of protest music: the vision of a "Guerrilla Radio" foreshadowed by Zack De La Rocha a quarter-century ago is flipped into a call to boycott radio schedules stuffed with substance-free tracks, while outside the country is collapsing; similarly, Public Enemy's take on Elvis in "Fight The Power" is recontextualised into a brilliant all-Brit reference: “I know they’re gonna hate that/ but their bar’s low like Take That/ motherfucker take that”.

Two highlights, equally emblematic of an unshakeable loyalty to the cause. The first, the already-mentioned "Health Is Wealth", identifies food as a marker of social inequality and turns into an invitation to stay active and look after your body with healthy eating ("Never know when a man might have to dash/ and a pig can't kill what a pig can't catch"). The other, "CENSORED", is a thirty-five-second, unaccompanied interlude tacked onto the end of "Pretty Songs", a showcase for Bobby's mic skills and the duo's refusal to bow to capital's flattery ("Your music upsets advertisers / it's 'bout the Peso, what they say goes"). These are perhaps the peaks of "The Price Of Life", an album that shows Bob Vylan sharpening the claws and teeth of an idea that's still raw but already incendiary, trying to convince the listener to be something more than a desensitised consumer. Switching off their feed, opening their eyes back up, bringing them back into the world.

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18/05/2022