Music For The People

The Enemy’s 2007 debut, We’ll Live And Die In These Towns, showed what a band could achieve if they cribbed all of The Jam’s best tricks but did so with a burning sense of self-belief. That album shifted 300,000 copies and established frontman Tom Clarke as a sort of Gen Y Liam Gallagher, a provincial English gobby-boy with a dreamy quiver in his voice (not to mention a penchant for media slagging matches – he got into a high-profile bun-fight with UK DJ Alex Zane). On Music For The People, the Coventry three-piece amp up their epic tendencies: ‘Elephant Song’ transmits a Zep-like rumble, although the chorus doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its tooth-loosening opening riff; an aching ‘Last Goodbye’ sounds like ‘Universal’-era Blur with sheet-lightning guitars on top. Occasionally, however the band trip up on their populist aspirations: ‘Nation Of Checkout Girls’ is a ballad of almost Stereophonics-esque limpness, while ‘Be Somebody’ is a Jam-esque belter that mistakes tribute for pastiche. But these are aberrations – for the most part, Music For The People is a case of Enemy Fine.

Key track: ‘Last Goodbye’