Album Review: The The - Ensoulment (2024)

It’s been a very long time since a truly new studio album from Matt Johnson dropped, a quarter of a century in fact, if you cast aside esoteric soundtracks, the odd single and spoken word projects. Craig Stephen offers some thoughts on Johnson's 2024 return, Ensoulment ...  

The master of a quartet of dark but sublime albums in the 80s and 90s – namely Soul Mining, Infected, Mind Bomb and Dusk - has a lot to live up to. But the production of an album in 2024 is a remarkable feat, not merely given Johnson’s semi-retirement from the music industry, but due to an emergency throat operation he went under just four years ago. It hasn’t apparently affected his voice which sounds as ever like the narrator of a teenage thriller movie and Leonard Cohen with an English accent.

 Matt Johnson’s name is front and centre of virtually everything related to The The, but Ensoulment is a record made by a five-piece band. That group comprises guitarist Barrie Cadogan, keyboardist DC Collard, bassist James Eller, and drummer Earl Harvin. Eller and Collard are old hands having been involved with The The in the late 80s and early 90s and the five of them toured as The The in 2018.

With every The The album there is a mix of the political and the personal. And Ensoulment is no different. On ‘I Hope You Remember (The Things I Can’t Forget)’, the protagonist looks back on a time that, while recent, still seems far in the distant. “The fireplace glow – the coal-tar soap/The Sunday roast – the tobacco smoke/ The jamboree bags – the penny chews/All now, disappearing from view.” It has something of a 1984 in song feel about, as fears surface about how the “machines are here to correct our thoughts” and how our dreams are now monitored and monetised.

Similarily, Johnson sings, on ‘Some Days I Drink My Coffee By The Grave of William Blake’, of a lost London which is becoming subsumed by the charge of modernity. The city, and indeed Albion itself, is now a land where the greedy are the new gods and the people are ruled by a “dictatorship in drag” re-shaped by quiet coup d’etats.

There’s a similar thoughtline on ‘Cognitive Dissident’, an Orwellian nightmare laid bare in song in which the population is now very much controlled. “Servile, surveilled/Dumbed down, curtailed/Screengrabbed, downranked/Untagged, debanked.”

And on ‘Kissing the Ring of POTUS’, The The return to a theme developed on 1986’s Infected, of an America that is a frightening world dominator and where Britain was described as the 51^st state of the USA. Sadly, for Johnson, little if anything has changed in the global superpower game of control: “The Empire of Lies secures allies/Like a spider ties up flies/Those hand-picked parasites ruling the servile satellites/Know who they dare not criticise/A psychopathic superpower spies from the sky/Transmitting viruses into the mind's eye.”

There are also a few tracks exploring Johnson’s other fascination in life, love and romance. His lustful, depraved voice reminds me of Tom Waits but is much easier on the ear. It is a tome that is very fitting for an exploration of modern day romance on ‘Zen & The Art Of Dating’ in which one of the protagonists goes on a journey from microwave dinners made for one to “That familiar throb deep inside,” after finding a lover by swiping right. It is somewhat cringey, with lines that come across as banal and repetitive but its redeeming feature is that Johnson tells the tale so well that you are riveted by the journey into whatever it is the two protagonists after searching for, be that a long-term romance or a casual affair.

Ensoulment is performed in a variety of styles – it has elements of English folk, indie-rock, jazz and a simmering of electronica. Nothing gets out of hand, it doesn’t develop into the sort of stirring pop that was the signature tune of, say, the single ‘Heartland’ or the ‘Beat(en) Generation’. It is, not, on the other hand, a yawning descent into MOR banality. The mood is right in the middle. That’s somewhat contrary to the lyrics which, as we have seen, are arresting and challenging.

You get the sense that Johnson is at home with his band, who are both engaging in their playing manner and allowing the singer’s talent to shine.

A case therefore of welcome back, and a demand that Ensoulment can be a spur to more material without such long gaps in between.

Album Review: Blur - The Ballad of Darren (2023)

Craig Stephen on the recent-ish Blur return …

In a recent review on this site, I noted that The Libertines were no longer spiky, noisy larrikins but had matured into almost sensible chaps. Likewise, Blur are now at arms and legs length from their manic Britpop days.

It’s hardly a radical about-turn, as the mood of The Ballad of Darren is to some degree an extension of the cynicism and tales of life of a middle age quartet that permeated its predecessor, 2015’s The Magic Whip (has it really been that long?).

 The friction of a band that has seen too much of each other and has led to the period of absence remains. But it is what spurs them to some extent. And yet it’s also clear that there is immense platonic love within the band. These are brothers to all intents and that means squabbles and hugs galore.

The first thing to note about The Ballad of Darren, is the cover. A lone, skinny male swimmer in an outdoor pool without another paddler or spectator around but plenty of empty chairs including the one the lifeguard should be sat at. Behind the pool are grey skies and the threat of rain. There’s a sense of isolation and troubles ahead. 

So, what does the record say? Third track ‘Barbaric’ has elements of gothic literature: “Empty grove, winter darkness. We are taking down the scaffolds very soon. We have lost the feeling that we’d never lose. It is barbaric darling.”

As we continue through the ten tracks, some rather slow, some rousing, we discover a tone of resignation, with Damon Albarn singing about moving on from a broken relationship(s). But from the standpoint that this has all happened before. And so, there’s little point getting too depressed about it, is there?  

It's quite an adult work, not in the sense that there are words that airline pilots should never utter (though ‘St Charles Square’ begins with “I fucked up”) but of a realism that comes with reaching and extending beyond middle age. ‘The Everglades’, for example, exhibits a sense of regret that is natural when you look into the past. “Many paths I’d wish I’d taken. Many times I thought I’d break,” sings Albarn in that near monosyllabic manner he has developed over recent years. ‘Country House’ and ‘Pop Life’ seem decades ago. As, of course, they were. But just as we are wondering if the narrator is consumed by a maudlin mid-life crisis, we are informed that “And calmer days will arrive.”

Some reviewers have referenced the tortured break-up album of 13 from 1999, the album that dimmed Blur’s star, but this feels like it should have been recorded by one of Albarn’s side projects, The Good the Bad And The Queen, of which Clash bassist Paul Simonon was a member. That act, which only released two albums in more than a decade, was an art project, with the second album Merrie England an attempt to understand where the country was post-Brexit and concluding that there was little to enthuse about.

Albarn’s melodies are beautifully formed and he forms a call and response liaison with guitarist Graham Coxon that adds a little frisson to the record. The production is polished but not overdone, and the band’s chemistry is the right measure to ensure that the 36 minutes glide magnificently by. 

As I put the record back in the sleeve, I look at the cover again. And I see not a scene of desolation but of peacefulness, of the kind of solitude we all aspire to at times. The swimmer is reaching his goals. Whatever they may be.