Air Conditioning. Sleaford Mods. 2014. Harbinger Sound.

If the concentration of world wide wealth in the hands of a quantifiable few weren’t enough to convince you that the rest of us are now a living culture awash in the trickle down detritus of ruling class castoffs, then Air Conditioning, Sleaford Mod’s empirical broadside describing this culture, should be. While they’re not the Clash, the duo functions as a dynamic set of eyes and tongues, reporting on a local, and thereby global, ugliness without any musical fussiness to lessen the urgency of their dispatch (what they do share with the Clash), only occasionally acknowledging the beat and at times veering off into an argot they don’t even care translates well or not. Appropriately enough for an act performing from within a real-time apocalypse, Air Conditioning is all panicked tempo, and dispels the fallacy, like the literature of William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, that the world will conveniently end all at once on some unspecified future time and date. The world is ending right now, and Sleaford Mods is stridently sounding the alarm.


Sept 2 021

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