Album Review: 'Nihilistic Glamour Shots' from Cabbage

Despite naming themselves after a foodstuff, and weathering a couple of media storms in 2017, the Mossley neo-punk quintet are poised to release their first full-length album. We’ll discount last year’s  Young, Dumb and Full Of… Cabbage, as it was a compilation of their first three EPs. Suffice to say, they haven’t reinvented the wheel. What they have done is stuck some cards in the spokes and what a lovely sound they make when you’re freewheeling down a steep hill.

Produced by James Skelly and Rich Turvey at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool, the result is a gloriously ragged-arsed affair, brimful of bridling polemic and shouty choruses. An interesting parlour game you can play while listening is spot-the-influence. I’m not going to list them all here, as it would be doing the band a disservice, but somewhere in their audio DNA there are hints of Dead Kennedys and even Link Wray. In spite of this, they are a distinctly English band, straddling a line somewhere between Kaiser Chiefs and The Libertines.

From the dive-bombing bassline of ‘Preach To The Converted’ through the bouncy sing-along chorus of ‘Gibraltar Ape’ and ‘Postmodernist Caligula’, the spectre of earlier musical movements are present in every note. They’re no museum piece though; they’re too much fun for that.

‘Reptiles State Funeral’ imagines Margaret Thatcher as a shape-shifting alien, while ‘Obligatory Castration’ suggests a future where even the Pope isn’t exempt from this drastic operation.
Punk’s not dead, it just smells... of Cabbage.

Record label: Infectious music
Listen to: ‘Gibraltar Ape’
Rating: 7/10