The Alarm - 'Under Attack' (Liberty) Released 20/02/06

Remember when Bob Dylan released that single under the name James Skinner? Well that showed ‘em didn’t it, proved the media, musos and DJs to be the fickle, bandwagon jumping scum we suspected.  You don’t remember?  That’s because it didn’t happen.  He didn’t need to do that.  The Alarm, on the other hand, clearly did. In February 2004, the band released a single under the pseudonym The Poppyfields, with singer Mike Peters defending the move as a backlash against “music that gets played based on image.”  Not like back in the day, when Vivian Westwood propelled The Sex Pistols safety pinned, DIY slash-it-up image, then.  Put it this way: Johnny Cash made some of his most renowned, ultimately beautiful work whilst resembling our very much ailing Granddad, and the omnipresent Arctic Monkeys are hardly sex gods.  Music can still very much speak for itself.

It’s a shame for these once theatrically coiffed folk-punks that this album can’t.  Although single ‘Superchannel’ showcases their best qualities: vicious guitars tangled in a maelstrom of furious drums, urgent vocals and a catchy dirty-bubblegum chorus, it still manages to sound decidedly derivative: a hollow endeavour at snarling punk and verve.  The album continues in a similar vein: conveniently forgetting the lambasting of trendy-kids-today music in favour of unconvincingly aping it with snotty-nosed but categorically pedestrian lyrics and the sort of stadium-esque U2 rock perhaps produced by Green Day’s embarrassing parents with a harmonica.  They even venture into cringingly whispered emo territory on infantilely titled and punctuated ‘It’s alright/it’s ok’, while titles such as ‘This Is Life Get Used To It’ suggest more than a shared penchant for big barnets with a ballad belting Good Charlotte.

‘My Town’ was affected by the jolting disbelief of the London bombings, with defiant clear throated declarations that “this is my town” (it’s not, he’s Welsh) generating a strident but nebulously trite political précis, owing more to a watered down Rancid rant than their aspirations of Clash-like commentary.  On a similarly weighty note, ‘Something’s Got to Give’ is Peters’s accolade to Live 8, offering such valuable sentiments as this “isn’t how the worlds meant to be”, and “nothing comes for free” with earnest pseudo-Biblical testaments; something perhaps best left to the Prophet Geldof.  However, you’ve got to admire their buoyant, yet deluded Welsh idealism.  Realistically though, harmonica tinged rumpus ‘Cease and Desist’ is possibly their most accurate self- prophecy: you’ll wish this album would.