HEY MA - GQ REVIEW

The kings of the sticky-floored indie disco return after seven years in the wilderness, but with one crucial omission – the tunes. Jam-heavy but ruinously unfocused, the band’s ninth album all-too-frequently defaults to screechy self-indulgence; producer Lee “Muddy” Baker’s nickname saying much for the quality of his arrangements. But it is singer Tim Booth who comes off the worst, warbling like a vocodered baboon over the unwelcome Sturm und Drang of an ever-present brass section. Railing against a modern world of military atrocities ("Hey Ma"), music critics ("Boom Boom") and – gasp – mobile phones (almost every song), Booth’s idiot-savant aphorisms of old have been replaced by nonsense couplets rhyming “pay-as-you-go” with “in utero”. To paraphrase the mighty “Sit Down”, if we hadn’t seen such riches – “Laid”, “Tomorrow”, “She’s A Star” – perhaps we could live with being bored.