Album Review: Gang of Four, Happy Now

Throughout a long history of constantly fluctuating line-ups, and despite periods of dissolution, guitarist Andy Gill has remained a constant presence in Gang of Four. The current configuration of John Sterry (vocals), Thomas McNeice (bass) and Tobias Humble (drums) might rightly be called Andy Gill’s Gang of Four.

Other than that, it’s business as usual: familiar spiky industrial-funk married to trenchant state-of-the-nation addresses. Despite the title, Happy Now sounds as serious as a death sentence. There’s not a great degree of variety, with the band preferring to find fifth gear and cruise steadily and menacingly. Gill’s angular guitars mesh economically with bouncy bass lines and solid drums, while any gaps are filled with squidgy synths that ooze from the speakers like Play-Doh.

They slip into third gear briefly for the fragile love song, ‘White Lines’. For the most part, though, it’s the sort of socio-political invective that has always been GoF’s stock-in-trade. Let’s face it, they’ll never be short of material, and a certain orange-hued man in a white house gets the Gang’s appraisal in ‘Alpha Male’ and ‘Ivanka: My Name’s On It’.

As a band with a lasting legacy that has influenced so many others – including but not limited to Nirvana, Massive Attack, Franz Ferdinand, St Vincent, Sleater-Kinney and IDLES – the temptation might be to trade on former glories and phone it in, but with the new blood on board, it sounds like they’re just getting started.