ALBUM REVIEW: Bob Vylan – Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life (Ghost Theatre)
Five years into their life as a band, London duo Bob Vylan have given notice that they’re to be taken seriously – and then some.
Bobby Vylan (vocals) and Bobbie Vylan (drums) are fiercely independent, manage themselves and have released this third album – which could be their big breakthrough – on their own label.
Blending UK hip-hop, grime, punk and electro, and throwing in the odd slice of spoken-word poetry, they fuse the anger and energy of all those genres, and bring with them with serious messages about what it’s like growing up as a young black man in Broken Britain.
After debut album Dread in 2019 and the follow-up We Live Here in 2020 they’re back with album number three – heavier, angrier and more essential than ever.
They pull no punches as they sing about racism, class, mental health, social inequality, the price of healthy eating (which they both advocate) and the extremes they’ve seen people go to in order to survive.
Take recent single Pretty Songs, where Bobby spits: “No liberal lefty cunt/Is gonna tell me punching Nazis ain’t the way/If you wanna hold hands and sing/Go do it over there while the big boys play, okay.” Message received and understood.
Wicked And Bad is a song from the streets about breaking the law to make money while wondering how we got into that situation in the first place. There’s only one culprit, as far as the Vylans are concerned: “Let’s go dig up Maggie’s grave and ask her where that milk went.”
Latest single GDP, featuring additional guitars from Lags of Gallows, is about the cost of living crisis, and points out that while “some are drowning in money, I’m barely keeping my head up”.
There’s a reggae feel to Health Is Wealth, thanks to a guest appearance by a couple of The Skints, and Bobby and Bobbie make their feelings clear on junk food: “The killing of kids with £2 chicken and chips/Is a tactic of war, waged on the poor.”
Big Man and Must Be More both address youngsters carrying guns and knives and dealing drugs, while He Sold Guns stresses the tragic human cost of selling firearms – “120 for a clean one …even if it meant killing someone else’s children.”
Turn Off the Radio (Radio Single) has huge riffs, and reminds me of nothing less than Rage Against The Machine at their peak, as it rails against “the bullshit these man are spinning, Candyland bands all smiling and grinning.”
Bait The Bear is possibly the angriest song on an album full of them, blasting British colonialism and what seems like an endemic Little Englander attitude where we turn immigrants away.
Big pharma wanting to keep us medicated by drugs of their choice are the targets of Drug War, while the closing Whatugonnado? is nothing less than a call to arms against the institutionally-racist police, or, as Bob Vylan would have it, “Little piggies in their uniform hunt black men like a sport.“
They’re unequivocal in their view of a black man’s lot in today’s Britain: “No justice, no peace, they don’t protect you like they’re s’posed to/We hit the street and do for self – the people must take over!”
Make no mistake, cross-genre bands like Bob Vylan are the future of UK punk, as this country’s black youth as just as pissed off as the white kids.
This album will be regarded as a classic in a few years’ time, and I can’t wait to see them live when they play at Rebellion Festival in Blackpool for the first time in August. 9/10
- Check out Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life on their Bandcamp page HERE.
