Albums

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Sleaford Mods: English Tapas

It’s all beginning to wear very thin indeed. Ten years ago this already addled Nottinghamshire duo captured the attention with bellowed, caustic and often astute observations delivered in an ur-rap monotone above cheapo punky laptop beats. The message then, humorously enough, was: everything is shit. Total shit. You’re shit, I’m shit, the country’s shit. This briefly entertaining and frequently obscene working-class nihilism was gratefully received by a music press that, desperately looking for something ‘edgy’, found itself confronted by the mimsy and anodyne public-school folk of Mumford & Sons and Stornoway and Laura Marling. Fair enough: it was, for a while, enlivening and a certain kind of antidote. But, you

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The xx: I See You

The xx is a trio of Londoners whose eponymous first album, released in 2009, has defined the way pop music sounds today. I remember knowing, when it came out, that I was listening to something both distinctive and familiar, which is usually an indicator of success. The schtick was to plunder various music canons which they were way too young to have heard first hand — Nineties house and rave, lachrymose mainstream Eighties synth-pop, angst-ridden shoegazing — strip it down and mix it all up with very clever beats, provided by the genuine talent of Jamie Smith. ‘Radically pleasant’ is what I thought at the time, a little sniffily, and

Thursday

Alastair Smart

Life’s rich collage

Such is the veneration in this country for the St Ives school of painters, it’s easy to forget that other art colonies existed, let alone thrived, in the mid-20th century: that in Great Bardfield, Essex, perhaps chief among them. The village near Saffron Walden was home to the likes of John Aldridge, Kenneth Rowntree, Michael Rothenstein, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden (1903–89). Maybe it’s going a bit far to say there has been a resurgence of interest in this loosely affiliated group of figurative artists. But it’s certainly a welcome coincidence that, following the success of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s superb Ravilious exhibition last year, comes the publication of Bawden’s scrapbooks