Songs for a Nanny State

Still (after all these years!) ranked among the most powerfully iconic bands on the punk circuit; still willing to speak up and out at a time when the very concepts of free speech and thought are being depicted as somehow criminal, Resistance 77's fourth album, Songs for a Nanny State is — surprise, surprise — another thunderous blast of energy and noise, shot through with riotous imagination, killer hooks, and the kind of choruses you normally only find on T-shirts and walls. A dozen slabs of defiance seem most concerned with confirming the vitality of the music they love. "True Punk and Oi," "One of the Boys," and "Punk Rock Songs" have an anthemic quality that, every time, speaks for everybody for whom punk itself is now a way of life. How easy it is, after all, to look out at the serried ranks and write them all off as a misguided fashion statement, and how contrarily awkward it becomes when you comprehend that there's an entire culture out there that will never buy into whatever propagandist rubbish is flowing forth from the establishment this month.

The "nanny state" itself refers back to one of '80s-era British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's fondest canards, a nightmare society in which the state itself did everything bar wipe your ass for you. (Although you could always hire an independent contractor if you wanted.) That nightmare has since come to pass in more ways than one can even count and, though the dozen songs here only glance towards the resultant beastliness (the anti-rock charity "All for One" comes closest), this album could scarcely have been created without its ghastly input. Punk rock in its purest form, then; folk music for the folks who need it, and a bloody nose for everyone who'd sweep such sensations under the carpet. Resistance 77 continue to resist.