Big Special – ‘Post Industrial Hometown Blues’ review: a heady dose of heart and reality

7 May, 2024

Big Special. Credit: Isaac Watson

“Obviously I fucking hate the Tories, I fucking hate Keir Starmer, it’s all against the people,” Big Special’s Joe Hicklin told NME when quizzed about the band’s politics last year. “The working class might as well be completely fucking invisible. It’s all wank. I just wish it would all burn down so we could start again.”

It’s a fair manifesto for a time where there are no absolutes, just an absolute shower. Nothing changes. Rather than the futility of standing on a soapbox and shouting for change, there’s more eloquence in showing the grit and the beauty of the everyday and saying, ‘We matter’. As drummer Callum Moloney put it, “Anyone who is disenfranchised against this system built against us is going to understand our music.”

READ MORE: Big Special make vulnerable, soulful punk that needs to be heard

Opener ‘Black Country Gothic’ captures the spirit of the Midlands duo’s debut and whole aesthetic. Your shouty punk lads and talky artsy bands are 10-a-penny, but there’s a bluesy depth here. Beneath a tower of soul as Moloney gives it what-for and Hicklin paints his hometown’s faded glory of “off-white angels kicking feral pigeons and picking up half-smoked nubbins” as a true noir epic; brute force and tenderness in equal measure. The spirit of Peaky Blinders but with scratch cards and hangovers over gore and cosplay.

That balance of hope through the fuckery runs throughout ‘Post Industrial Hometown Blues’. “I’m a septic tank half-full kind of guy,” Hicklin offers on the ‘iLL’. The band’s feet are firmly on the ground and in the shit – we’ve all had that ‘Desperate Breakfast’ before sleepwalking into thankless toil, and that “day that broke me” when enough is finally enough on ‘Shithouse’. That said, this album is a ruddy ambitious one.

From the self-aware funk and hip-hop tinged ‘I Mock Joggers’ to the lung-bursting ‘This Here Ain’t Water’, Big Special use a varied palette of noise. ‘My Shape (Blocking The Light)’ sounds like a Brummie Arab Strap finding themselves in Blade Runner, while the the romp of ‘Butcher’s Bin’ gatecrashes the dancefloor.

Hicklin’s poetry sings both with bluster (see the fearless spoken word battlecry of ‘Mongrel’) and the more intimate moments – like the utterly gorgeous ‘For The Birds’. Ambient post-rock piano backs him as he recalls “we were supposed to be young – half-cut and completely severed”, vowing to carry his fractured past boldly into the future.

That redemption and resolve to “make it through the night” arrives fully on the synth-punk meets The National triumphant closer of ‘DiG!’. Sure “every day is a balancing act, trying to find truth and divide fact, but we’re only born to pay bills and dig holes”. Amen. But as the horns ring out, you end this record knowing that now is not the time for defeat. Keep going. At least Big Special see you.