The Wind-Up Birds - Poor Music (2014)

Two years ago, The Wind-up Birds released their début album The Land. An album about Englishness, communication, isolation and community, sizzling with post-punk energy, moving, bleakly funny and full of tunes, it won plaudits far and wide, with 6Music and certain areas of the press and blogosphere clutching it to their hearts. Notwithstanding deserved comparisons to Art Brut, The Wedding Present and The Fall, it stood alone amongst the alternative music of 2012 – or any year.

Poor Music is more than just a worthy follow-up to that classic debut. Still unmistakably (Northern) English, still bleakly funny, and still musically bursting with just the right balance of hooks and grit, it’s also bigger, braver, cleverer and scarier. And (unbelievably) better. Taking its cue from albums like Pavement’s ‘Wowee Zowee’, it’s a sprawling record where carefully constructed epics sit alongside tossed-off fragments, where perfectly constructed punky pop songs rub shoulders with painful, searing bleakness. In vocalist Paul Ackroyd they have a truly peerless lyricist, and the band match him note for note.