Levellers

IT'S EASY - and great fun - to rip the piss out of The Levellers but no amount of cheap jibes can alter the fact that when it comes to penning rabble rousing pop anthems, these guys are championship contenders.

Another unavoidable truth about Brighton's finest is that they have one hell of a persecution complex. Forget chips, we're talking a sack of King Edward's here and spread over a whole album, this persistant talk of being 'screwed by the system' becomes not only depressing but incredibly tedious.

Whinging to the converted makes you bitter and twisted, not radical. Come up with a few alternatives and a way of putting them into practice, though, and watch the buggers run for fresh underwear.

Right, having established that The Levellers are unlikely to topple any governments in the forseable future, let's get back to the music. You remember that - the stuff we used to talk about in the olden days before realising that 'personal manifestos' were more important than peripheral issues such as songs and what a record actually sounds like.

'Commercial' may be a dirty word in their oh-so-politically-correct vocabularly but this is without doubt the band's most accessible album to date. Imagine if Mike Scott had married The Waterboys' trad flirtation to The Clash's power chord fetish and you'll have some idea of what The Levellers are up to here.

The best moments come when they introduce rogue elements into the proceedings - 'The Warning' wouldn't deliver nearly as forcefully without the punctuating use of The Kick Horns' brass section, while the tin whistle adds extra Celtic fury to the cover of McDermott's Two Hours' 'Dirty Davey'.

The didgeridoo is not an instrument I'd man the barricades to defend but in the context of 'This Garden' and Jacinda Jones' hippy dippy backing vocals, it makes complete and perfect sense.

The other stand-out moment is 'Julie', a stripped bare tale of heroin abuse which works despite rather than because of the incongruous bagpipe solo tacked on the end. Jem Finer is credited with playing the mysterious 'hurdy gurdy' but as there's no trace of the moonlighting Pogue in the mix, we'll just have to assume that someone forgot to bung the fader up.

Trivia fans and members of the PMRC should make sure they get their hands on the CD version of Levellers for the 'secret' track which pops up precisely 10 minutes and 13 seconds after the album is supposed to have finished. To be honest, it's a bit of a damp squib but Hot Press is nothing if not thorough!

And that, boys and girls, is that. For all their earnest attempts, The Levellers aren't going to change the world but at least you can hum along as they try.

• Stuart Clark