Album Review: Gang Of Four, Content

Release Date: January 25
Label: Yep Roc Records

It's a sad fact that Gang Of Four, one of the greatest post-punk bands of the late 70s, only recorded two-and-a-half good albums. The same band that recorded 1979's blistering Entertainment! also gave the world such undercooked and forgotten albums as Hard (1983) and Mall (1991). You probably haven't heard these albums and you probably never should. Entertainment! remains the band's definitive statement, made all the more powerful by the fact that the band never even came close to duplicating it. With its snarling guitar work, courtesy of alt-guitar hero Andy Gill, relentlessly tight rhythm section and barked, politically charged vocals, Entertainment! is a landmark album. Ranting about consumerism, class warfare and gender relations against an aggressive musical backdrop, Gang Of Four's fingerprints are still found throughout modern music. So here we are in 2011, with Content, Gang Of Four's first album in sixteen years. Gill's guitars are loud. Frontman Jon King yelps a lot. There are songs with titles like "You'll Never Pay For The Farm." Content feels carefully calculated to be a return to the Entertainment! aesthetic. Yet, it never moves beyond simple imitation. Opening with the hacking guitar storm of "She Said 'You Made A Thing Of Me'," Content's biggest weakness becomes apparent very quickly. Without the band's former rhythm section of bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham, the song sounds flat and thin. What follows is more of the same, save for the grating vocoder exercise "It Was Never Gonna Turn Out Too Good." Is this better than Gang Of Four's insipid mid-career offerings? Yes. But it sounds uncomfortably close to a band doing a good Gang Of Four impression than the great band themselves. Unlike their contemporaries Wire, who showed how post-punk bands can age well with this month's Red Barked Tree, Gang Of Four have proven that perhaps they are truly best left to memory.

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