Unravelling England – The Singing Loins (Damaged Goods)

Sitting somewhere between the kind of urban folk-punk that abounded in the wake of the Pogues and the Medway bedroom blues of Billy Childish, this accomplished 12-tracker paints a portrait of an England filled with love, loss and circus freaks.

On tracks like Cunny Ann they come on like early, full steam ahead The Men They Couldn’t Hang, though the Loins, who have been around since 1990, are no mere copyists. So Sophisticated drags up Kentish/London/Irish roots with some aplomb, though the standout track is Please Take My Scissors Away, which offers a punky collision between Brel and the Tiger Lillies that sees everyone crashing off the end of the pier and into the drink. Lyrically and vocally the Singing Loins offer up something that offers glimpses of Ian Dury and Robb Johnson, though the snarl of sometimes collaborator Childish is in there as well.

Dirty Doras seems to draw on the more emotive end of Chas and Dave’s back catalogue, with Old Ferry Lane expounding on the kind of grimy, canal-based romance found in Dirty Old Town. Unravelling England is certainly a place to find wonderful portraits of outcasts, oddballs and (not so) lovable rogues, as Psycho Hippie and The Fat Boy of Peckham show, the latter being perhaps the first musical tribute to south London’s one-man early 20th century obesity crisis. Since You Were My Girl shows the Singing Loins do gentle ballads as well as they execute dialect-laden thrashes, which means that you will soon have this catchy album on repeat so you can shout or sob along as the mood takes you.

Iain Aitch
Iain Aitch is author of We’re British Innit, published by Collins (www.britishinnit.com)