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- Title:
- The Long Decline
- Artist:
- The Long Decline
- Cat #:
- OVER61CD
- 18 amazing folk-punk originals plus a powerful cover of Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come. Includes the seminal I'm A Jew. "This is probably the most original record you'll hear all year" - NME. CD deleted - download only!
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Press Release for The Long Decline
"This is probably the most original record you'll hear all year." That's what the NME said about the first Long Decline single I'm A Jew and just maybe that also applies to this the first Long Decline album. The Long Decline consists of Kenny Wisdom (singer lyricist songwriter and some of the worst guitar you've ever heard on Like A Blind Man) Vic Godard (of Subway Sect guitar) Mark Perry (of Alternative TV/Sniffin' Glue fame drums) Rob Ugly (bass and mandolin) Andy Gwatkin (violin) and Luci Bocchino (mandolin and guitar). Both Mark and Luci contributed in the songwiting department as did Vic Godard who wrote the quirky calypso-like The Island.
Despite the presence of Mark and Vic this is not some punk supergroup reliving past glories (though if you want to talk about punk rock as an attitude as being about honesty and not compromising then The Long Decline are right up there). The mandolins and violins give these songs an Eastern European feel with a bit of bluegrass mixed in for good measure. As Record Collector said of their recent single Buckle Up And Join In Lad it "sounds like the live entertainment in a pre-war Russian Gulag". The Jewish Chronicle declared "few punk bands ever released anything as in-your-face as The Long Decline's I'm A Jew".
There's a staggering 18 original songs on the album plus a powerful version of the Sam Cooke classic A Change Is Gonna Come. Highlights include a re-working of I'm A Jew the beautiful Feathers the strange A Pox On Humanity (which seems to be about smallpox) the eerie Fright Flight the humorous I'm Hipper Than You and the frightening Make My Life Hell.
Most of the songs are under three minutes the notable exception being the eponymous The Long Decline which is quite frankly nearly 7 minutes of sheer brilliance. It starts out like a folk ballad full of mandolins and acoustic guitars until the violinist from hell turns up and the song is transformed into something akin to the first Velvet Underground LP! Lyrically the song seems to be a seering indictment of someone who believed in the Thatcherite/Major dream a sort of Like A Rolling Stone for the end of the century...
Kenny hopes that the album will inspire other people to respond creatively since he himself never wrote anything until he was 35. It's never too late...
Track Listing
A Pox On Humanity/I'm Hipper Than You/The Long Decline/Buckle Up And Join In Lad/The Island/A Change Is Gonna Come/'Patsy'/I'm A Jew/Fright Flight/Make My Life Hell/Reflections/Call To Me/Know The Rules/Like A Blind Man/Bedsitter Blues/Drugs/The Dingles/Let's Hitchhike/Feathers
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