Ian Dury: New Boots and Panties!!
I woke up today with the express intent of listening to Ian Dury's "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll". It's awesome along with being hilarious and historic (it's where the term comes from if you didn't know). Then I figured I'd review his debut album, only to find that "Sex..." was only a single. Balls. Oh, well.
So this is pub rock. The only other pub rock I was familiar with was Dr. Feelgood and I got the impression that they weren't really representative of the genre. This is much more middle-of-the-road, but it's still got that simple, R&B worship quality that comes with at least some energy like a Big Mac comes with fries. If you've grown up on punk then this certainly won't be setting off your pacemaker, but if you're an early Stones fan then you could do a lot worse.
Ian Dury certainly has an...interesting singing voice. Usually when I hear such a heavy, lower class British accent I expect the band to be chasing itself to the end of the song while the "singer" shouts about communism or poop or something. I hear that Johnny Rotten actually took a lot of his act from Ian, and that's kinda what he sounds like. Like Johnny Rotten if Johnny Rotten wasn't pissed off about everything and would rather just sing a little tune in a ridiculous accent. Alright so maybe that doesn't sound like such a great selling point, but he has more than enough charisma to make up for any possible vocal shortcomings and keeps things entertaining even when the music is kind of "meh".
What the? Third song from the end and they went punk. Ian's yelling, the band's going all Clash. I'm not saying it's terrible, but it's just completely out of place. I guess we're seeing the point where the bottom of pub rock fell out and punk rock took over.
All in all it was about what I was expecting, except for the end: fun, catchy R&B that was just waiting for punk to make it irrelevant. It's not the kind of thing I'd feel compelled to listen to everyday, but at some infrequent intervals when I'm in the mood for some simple rock'n'roll, I must just think of Ian Dury.