#wreckless eric

Now, after a lifetime’s worth of lyrics tweaking capitalism, striverism and the middle class, Goulden has decided to revisit the material with his current band (you can hear Amy Rigby in the choruses).  “The original recordings were released 40 years ago on an album nobody liked, least of all me,” he admits in a note scrawled in marker on the album cover. “It’s always been a regret to me because I think these songs mark my ‘coming of age’ as a songwriter. I decided to re-record them just to see if I could and to lay to rest the ghastliness of the original release.”

The thing is, he’s got a point. The songs on England Screaming sound very much in line with Wreckless Eric’s recent output, brash and tuneful, the words barked out in the artist’s clanging, faintly tremulous tenor, the choruses exploding in swaggering hooks. And they are very good songs, not a real dud in the bunch, and a couple that rank with the artist’s very best. Listen, for instance, to how “Land of the Faint at Heart” gathers steam, toiling disgustedly though conformist Thatcherite England (“raise a cheer for the Nobel Prize for ignorance”), but breaking out in an all-hands, instantly memorable refrain. The song is a searing indictment, but also kind of a bop, and you’ll be humming it to yourself before too many plays have gone by.

Same goes for “Food Factory,” a preening, blustering ode to dead end jobs, or the sharp guitared “Playtime Is Over.” “Lady of the Manor” is the best of the lot, to my ears, a cutting-satire of homeowner pride. It’s so closely drawn that you can’t entirely dismiss the woman’s fixation on garden beds and washing machines and genteel lemonade in the garden; you feel, as in all really great parody, the strength of the argument that’s punctured.

This material comes from a stretch when Wreckless Eric gave up on his boy-band, pop star aspirations and began to mine a darker, more complicated vein. It’s not surprising that listeners and critics missed the turn, especially since the first iteration still sounded very pop. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can see the beginnings of Goulden’s evolution into the bitterly funny (but still hooky) songwriter he’s become now. And beyond that, the songs are excellent and well worth saving.