ALBUM: Sergeant Buzfuz - The Jewelled Carriageway

First published on subba-cultcha.com, August 2006.

This review got me a lovely little note from the band who had some um...feedback (more of which later)

In my hometown of Bath there’s a pub called The Bell. On a busy night you can’t move for incredibly well spoken white people with dreadlocks and small scruffy dogs on strings. The beers on tap and the drinkers often share names (‘Parson’, ‘Jeremiah’) and the patrons all look slightly beaten up by life- even the kids look about thirty.
Everyone here’s overly serious about politics and after a few too many pints of ‘Gardeners Rest’ (and a couple of aggressive games of Bar Billiards) get very vocal about “the lasting damage Thatcher did to this country”.

Sergeant Buzfuz would be lapped up by this crowd- they’re oddball folksters with an irritating taste for the wilfully esoteric, they take their cues from such earnest predecessors as Leonard Cohen (the man who’s unfathomable ‘talent’ made tiresome whining an art form) and are totally serious about their ‘craft’- each member plays at least three instruments- all of which are listed in teeth-gratingly irritating detail in the sleevenotes.
There’s no doubt then that this quintet can play. In fact I’d venture that songs like ‘It’s Not What You’ve Got It’s Who You Give It To’ contain the finest examples of ‘Hammered Dulcimer’ and ‘Singing Bowl’ playing you’re likely to hear all year.
Lead singer Joe Murphy somehow manages to adopt Stephan Malkmus’ rudimentary singing style while removing all of the traces of warmth, charm and personality that make the former Pavement vocalist's records so special. What we’re left with is eleven tracks of tuneless whimsy- the worst example by far being ‘Here Comes The Popes Part 1 (1st Millennium), an excruciating musical chronology of the comings and goings at The Vatican that surely has a target audience of approximately five (oddly the same number of people that play in Sergeant Buzfuz).

Let me be clear about this (just in case my own pretentious and wilful esotericism went over your head), I hate this album- it’s contrived folk-pomp made solely by and for a group of comfortably-off smug neo-hippies who’ve read far too much.
Now…mine’s a pint of Gardeners Rest please- sorry, I’ve only got a £50 note. Is that going to be OK?

The band said this (edited for brevity (unlike my review) only):

We had a good laugh about your review. I don't really care what you think of the music, but one thing I'd like to state for the record: we are certainly not 'comfortably off'.

And to have it implied I speak in a posh accent by someone called Henry? Ha ha ha.

And what's wrong with reading books? I'm not that well read but I've read quite a lot and I'm proud of it but then I'm working class and you probably don't understand that attitude. You sound like a little middle class tosser who thinks it's uncool to be educated. Go and join Pink fucking Floyd you prick. And are you saying you thought Thatcher didn't fuck things up for most of us in this country? Are you a Tory?

Go fuck yourself you prick

They maybe had a point...