A Best of the the Wind-Up Birds from Spotify on the Moon


Recently Mr Billy Bragg made a quite correct generalisation about the lack of guitar bands that were producing any kind of protest music and lamented Kasiban's rather tame attempt to get a bit political with "their tackling of Google and the NSA's observational tactics".

Well the Wind-Up Birds from Leeds in God's very own county are very much an exception to that generalisation.

They have been recording music for 10 years but have only recently released their second album Poor Music after their debut The Land from 2012. But before that they released a couple of albums worth of material on EPs and singles and it is all available to stream or download on their Bandcamp page and with the early EP collections (Acting Thick for Money vols 1 & 2) you can decide how much you would like to pay for the downloads.

They have been compared to the Fall but I find a lot in common with their fellow Yorkshire Treasures over in Sheffield -  The Arctic Monkeys and Pulp  - only with all the sex removed and a lot more politics thrown in. Musically they can be very like the Arctic's first two albums but when they are not then they can be more diverse and interesting. Lyrically they are up there with Mr Cocker and Mr Turner but more like Jarvis with talky interludes or whole tracks that are more spoken than sung and this works brilliantly with likes of There Will Won't Always Be an England but, as with Jarvis, not always. They do also match Jarvis on the humour front though, especially more recently with Addis Ababa and most of On the ropes... but then. Another similarity with both Sheffield bands is managing to make great non album tracks that are better than the A sides - a prime example being In a Yorkshire Call Centre I Knelt Down and Wept, along with a sometimes odd choice of A sides. Where they better both is with their passion which can be as powerful for me as Mr Billy Bragg at his politically protesting best.

Below is a best of what you can find on Spotify which is a bit more than on Deezer but as mentioned it can all be found on Bandcamp. I hope that their next album will be the classic they are so obviously capable of making as I think this playlist is 25 songs of unrelenting brilliance.

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