After nearly 25 years making some rather excellent music, the latest album by the Levellers, Static On The Airwaves, still manages to raise the expectations that somewhere there are groups that still connect with their core audience and create music that not only coaxes the listener to enjoy but also actively want to spread around their friends and say see, “This is what I’m talking about, this is what’s wrong”.

Last year the band celebrated the 20^th anniversary of probably their most popular album, Levelling The Land with a much admired tour and with great critical acclaim for their honest approach to music. Static On The Airwaves follows on from that fine tradition of political Folk/Rock music and turns it up several notches as they show how Britain hasn’t changed in any way, shape or form since they first burst onto the scene.

The album opens up with the sublime title song, a seven line musical expression, a poem that gives the listener the image of where the album is going to take them. From there the album becomes what you expect from a well-produced Levellers album but with that little something extra, a slice of remembrance of what the nation went through in recent memory. Like Liverpool’s Amsterdam, The Alarm or New Model Army’s music, it is poetry with passion, the lyrics meaning something more tangible than the vast majority of so called celebrity pop idols are ever likely able to say.

We Are All Gunmen sees the album kick off in some style and with total biting observation that sees the line, “Where Constable paints awesome skies, Instead of making suspects eyes” hove sharply into view and becomes a damning indictment of what really is happening in some parts of the U.K.

The really great thing about this album is the way it makes you reach for the books or access the World Wide Web and start referencing where certain song come from. It’s not a new idea but there are so few bands that are able to pull it off. In the case of the members of the Levellers, the song Mutiny is a prime and brilliant example.  For anybody who was fan of the 1986 television drama The Monocled Mutineer by Alan Bleasdale and starring the young Paul McGann as Percy Toplis, will be aware of the brutal conditions that British soldiers found at Etaples in France during World War One. Mutiny tells the tale of the only man sentenced to death by firing squad for his part in the rebellion at the camp. The tale of Jesse Robert Short is one of those songs which crawls underneath the skin of humanity and the story that every person has. The song, like every other on the album is done with compassion and a seething hatred for what has happened to some in the past.

Static On The Airwaves is an album of beauty, of intelligent and demanding thought and it seems that there really is no stopping the Levellers.

Ian D. Hall