Revisiting the Housemartins' second album, bought before Christmas on an EBay raid, didn't fill me with as much expectation as the debut had. Perhaps what was new then was subsequently repeated, and no longer fresh, but it's offered up a few surprises, mostly positive. It's certainly an album I bought at the time, and enjoyed, but haven't really missed, so let's see why.
Opening with the title track, The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death, it's a bouncy, if over-wordy to the point of clumsiness, song, about the working classes who adore the royal family. The recipe of jangly pop with barbed lyrics continues with I Can't Put My Finger On It, before the pace slows for the quite ordinary The Light Is Always Green. But there's a couple of more uptempo, high energy songs in The World's On Fire and We're Not Going Back, both eminently listenable, and which bookend the short but likeable harmonica led instrumental Pirate Aggro.
However, it's in the second half that the album's quality rises, with the three hit singles hitting home. Me And The Farmer is the band's take on the agricultural industry which powers along making it's point with limited subtlety - a song perhaps due for a reissue in the wake of millionaire landowners crying about paying their taxes like the rest of us do. Then it's straight into Five Get Over Excited, which is, as the chorus suggests 'fun, fun, fun' - retaining the joyful Housemartins' sound with some lyrical barbed wire. Johannesburg is a slow guitar/vocals song, and understated comment on apartheid South Africa, seemingly obligatory for any left leaning musicians of the era.
Bow Down and You Better Be Doubtful follow, both decent songs, both a welcome listen, yet neither remarkable before the album concludes with the lovely Build, on the subjct of urban sprawl, a vein rickly mined by songwriters since Pete Seeger's Little Boxes. It's a fitting end to the album, showing where Paul Heaton and Stan Cullimore were going as songwriters, and it wouldn't have sounded out of place as an early Beautiful South album (featuring as it does, the vocals of drimmer Dave Hemingway).
I'm finding this a strange one - the songs seem stronger than on London 0 Hull 4 and Heaton and Cullimore have matured as songwriters, but there seems to be something missing, perhaps the immediacy and naive charm of the earlier songs. So for me, paradoxically, better songs deliver a less satisfying album. Perhaps that's why the band decided to call an end to proceedings after this album.
4* - there's something missing here, but it's still a great listen.
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