The Enemy - Music for the People

Album Review by Allan Valente | 22 Apr 2009
Album title: Music For The People
Artist: The Enemy
Label: Warner Bros
Release date: 27 Apr

The stomping opener to Music For The People, and the muffled screeching that proceeds it, could suggest that Coventry’s self-declared finest have stumbled drunkenly down the puffed up and narcotic-ridden path Oasis took for Be Here Now. Comparisons can be drawn between the two, but The Enemy stop short of making an album of such ridiculously overblown proportions. Opener Elephant Song lays down an authoritative marker for the rest of the record, echoing Led Zeppelin in all their Rock God pomp with its crunching guitars and pulsating drums. Keep Losing is Tom Clarke at his downtrodden working class best, always fighting against the waves of inevitability which threaten to drown him and his crestfallen comrades. Though never quite original, Music For the People is an assured document of urban decay; further down the line one could imagine this being perceived as the soundtrack to Britain's downfall. Presumably, Clarke wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Enemy play Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh with Oasis on 17 June.

http://www.theenemy.com