Next year will see 20 years since the release of We Live And Die In These Towns, the debut release from Coventry’s The Enemy. It’s also been ten years since their last studio album.
However Social Disguises swoops into your ears whisking you straight back to the energy and sound of 2007. With 35 minutes of solid upbeat rock rhythms and riffs, with Tom Clarke’s lyrics and Jam-era Weller like delivery carving through the middle.
Album opener The Boxer, which they also opened with at recent show at London’s 100 Club on Oxford Street, sets out the stall for the new record nicely with a tale about past glories while stuck behind a desk job. All over a deep guitar chords and rhythm section, punctuated with nice synths and backing vocals.
Not Going Your Way picks up in a springy riff over a tom and snare drum beat, with a tale of the futility of a deteriorating relationship “It was good at first, but now it’s the worst” with a great lyric that is going to be sung over and over at live shows “Oh, I’m not going your way. You’re not coming my way, no” which is a great summing up of stubbornness of some arguments.
The Last Time has little hints of Aggro from their debut, skipped from the short live set at the 100 Club. While Trouble makes it into the set, which has a nice repetition of line ending echoing the Duck Test as a nice device. Fans who had already heard the album definitely singing along to that part.
The band finished the new songs in the set with title track Social Disguises, which Clarke has mentioned in interviews is one of the most personal songs he’s even written. It’s a candid explanation of his grappling with an adult diagnosis of autism “It’s about struggling in social situations, masking, finding small talk draining” as he told Northern Chorus.
Clarke would tell the crowd that they didn’t want to be a band that only play new stuff, so here’s some old stuff too. Kicking into the chord of Had Enough, to great pleasure of the crowd, who were soon singing arm in arm to the chorus and the “Had enough, had enough” punctuations.
A quick diversion to their second album Music for the People with the track Be Somebody, before two from We Live and Die In These Towns. With mega ballad Happy Birthday Jane making the crowd sway along, beer glasses aloft. Then to close with their debut’s title track, which is such a great tale of growing up outside London and maybe for four minutes we can pretend this subterranean small club is a social club somewhere else in the country, not nestled between Ann Summers and MiniSo in the nations capital.
Ultimately the new album is bang on the money as a The Enemy album and the songs on it will slot nicely into their live shows. With great zeitgeist summing up lyrics as good as Alex Turner or Paul Weller. Alongside great rhythms and melodies.