Quite why Baxter Dury isn't already a national treasure is a mystery to me. Not for his nepo connections but for his perfectly pitched delivery and super-dry observations. He's sardonic, sleazy, sexy and has a cracking dog – what more does any man need? Maybe a bigger profile and some higher rankings in the charts...
This is a very different proposition from the last album, I Thought I Was Better Than You (full disclosure, I gave it album of the year on this very site, so this was going to have to work hard to impress). The different tone is down to producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Rhianna, Florence & The Machine) who asked Dury to back away from the music. The result is something much more immediately digestible (singles "Allbarone", "Schadenfraude" and "Return of the Sharpheads" are as catchy as chickenpox). They worked together quickly – Epworth crafting the backing track and Dury writing "to fit" immediately, then recording straight away. That way there was no time for over-thinking, re-shaping and re-hacking. Just a "first take" attitude.
Dury's seeking to be "more direct, more energetic..." he says, "not the same old entitled knobhead in a grey nylon suit." A reinvention at the age of 53 feels very now. "I don't want to say it's contemporary," he surmises. "Because I sound like a c*nt using that word. But it does sound really contemporary. It doesn't sound like a Harrods hamper band made it. It doesn't sound like a band made it all." That's probably because of Epworth's knob twiddling, which allows Dury more space to experiment with his delivery.
While somewhat unlikely, many of these songs deal with romantic rejection. Back to the title track, where the evocation of rejection in that most soulless of drinking establishments is dry and wry, the extra punch in the guts being the presumption – "before I'd even met you I'd booked a hotel". "Schadenfraude" also deals with not being adored and cuts Dury's vocal to the bone – there's no doubting this is a dance track.
"Alpha Dog" is a classic dancefloor filler. Pounding beats, disco frippery and a super-catchy bassline. Long-term collaborator JGrrey delivers her trademark soaring vocals as she does on many of the tracks – always helping to balance Dury's bleakness. It's particularly powerful when she sings some of his unfiltered lyrics in the sweetest of ways – "I'll sit back and admire how much you hate yourself/You're just a bunch of soul fuckers you total c*nts."
Laugh-out-loud observations with a subversive lyrical twist are Dury's stock in trade and there's plenty of that here. See "Vintage cashmere, inappropriate love maker" ('Return of the Sharpheads'), "As the Fat Duck fuckers live their lives/Breakfast at the Berghain" ('Hapsburg'). "Mockinjay" is another track with vast, sweeping production, rat-a-tat-tat drums, dealing with today's propensity for thinking we're "different", rebelling against the ordinary but most of us are actually pretty bog standard – "We are all the same/Beneath all the duvets/Ashamed of what we said/Before the night ends". The album finishes with "Mr W4" which is largely sung by Dury, but filtered through God-knows-what, supplemented by synth strings. This has more of the melancholic air of previous work and is the most introspective piece on here, which kind of closes the circle.
It's brief (just over half an hour) but it's very strong. Has Epworth catapulted the "nylon god" into the mainstream? Time will tell.
