The Adicts – Life Goes On

A couple years ago I was in London after Cock Sparrer's big show for the release of "Here We Stand". Luckily enough, I'd managed to time my visit to the Adicts gig in Islington. While waiting outside for the club to open, I struck up a conversation with a guy in line who commented on my "Joker in the Pack" tattoo. He was and always will be a dedicated fan. He explained "you have to understand, back then when they (The Adicts) started, we had nothing. Ipswich was dead. There were no jobs, no future. Everyone was on the dole. [The Adicts] gave us hope. And that changed our world."

No small praise for anyone, let alone a band, and after more than thirty years they're still at it. They've provided the single moment of calm and peace at the ill-fated 2002 Holidays in the Sun festival. They've convinced a well oversold bar crowd in Atlanta to forget their squeamishness, sit on the floor, and sing about wanting a cup of tea. They've been the soundtrack to joyous moments, video games, birthday parties, New Year's celebrations. They've been the soundtrack to sad ones, as when we laid Andy Cohn to rest after a devastating house fire. They are the Adicts, and the most recent chapter comes in the shape of a new album, accompanied by live video footage from recent shows around the world, and yet another world tour that kicks off overseas this May.

"Life Goes On" may seem an indifferent album title, but one can hardly argue with the sentiment. Following the slightly darker "Rollercoaster" and "Rise and Shine "albums, "Life Goes On" combines the older Adicts style of cheerful cheek with further exploration of some new sounds.

Second track "I Love You But Don't Come Near Me" is an example of the former, buoyantly cheerful, and insidiously catchy, expressing the "crying shame, when you're around you, bring me down," which fits nicely with the Adicts legacy of "Love Sucks" and "My Baby Got Run Over by a Steamroller". Similarly, opening track "Spank Me Baby" is utterly right when it asserts "you'll want to sing along with this catchy little song". These are songs that will easily have new and old fans alike bouncing in the usual adulation when played at upcoming shows.

Never let it be said The Adicts are stagnating, though. Haunting piano gives way to a cabaret story of a snakelike character in "Mr Hard", a track more in the vein of recent work like "Go Genie Go", and "Gangster" includes something that sounds suspiciously at first like Spanish guitar, and rolls on in a languid tempo that evokes black luxury cars gliding down empty streets in the rain up to no good. One would be oddly unsurprised to hear this song in the background of some Humphrey Bogart film where he played Chandler's Phillip Marlowe; equal parts detective, drunk, and cop punching bag.

Overall, the album hangs together well, and each song has it's own high points from Monkey's rant over the end of the title track about the high price of beer, to the good old frenetic Punk sound of "Full Circle", the only real difficulty in this album is not being able to listen to anything else for weeks on end.


*** UPDATED *** from this review's original publish date on 4/10/2010
This record was just released in the US
While lacking an official US release date so far, the album and digipack are available as imports on Amazon, or presumably pick it up at live shows, which are listed (along with lots of other goodies) on their official website www.adicts.us

 

-Jo Problems-
Big Wheel Online Magazine
 

 

                                           Go HERE to see all the latest record reviews