Graham Reid | | <1 min read
From the droll post-punk poetry of John Cooper Clarke and declamatory rants of the Fall's Mark E. Smith, through Blur's mannered Park Life and Country House, The Street's tenement block rap, Sleaford Mods and last year's Dry Cleaning, there's a lineage of British spoken word-cum-indie rock.
Yard Act from Leeds are a spiky, enjoyably potty-mouthed socialist four-piece who broadcast on a similar wavelength with Clash/Beastie Boys hooks and socio-political anger wrapped in dry humour, as on Dead Horse: “Are you seriously still tryna kid me that our culture will be just finŠµ, when all that's left is nobheads Morris Dancing to Sham 69?”
Yard Act – like many late Seventies punk acts – tear at the delusions of Britain's private sector and secure aristocracy through skewering satire (Rich, Payday) and, in the pessimistic Tall Poppies, offer a more bleak take than Ray Davies' A Well Respected Man and David Watts about the local lad made good which ends with defeatist realism: “So many of us just crabs in a barrel, with no feasible means to escape the inevitable cull”.
Sometimes their reductiveness doesn't gel (Witness) but Yard Act are ironic, impudent, intelligent and provocative members in that illustrious lineage.
Modern life is still rubbish.
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