The Unstoppable Sex Machine returns a year or so after leaving their record company, signing to indie Cooking Vinyl and swelling to a six piece. A World Without Dave is billed as a mini album, designed to tide us over before a full length release later in the year. Six tracks in the UK, the rest of the world gets three extra songs.
It's absolutely bloody superb. There. Cut through the hyperbole, the flowery build-up. Fantastic stuff. A trawl through Tory Britain, down the darker alleys of England, Carter have always dealt with people and problems their peers ignore. "And God Created Brixton" is especially good - a wander through a late night riot backed by pulsing synthesizers you'd generally expect to find cropping up on one of Marc Almond's more epic stories.
A reviewer for one of the English weekly magazines suggested that Carter's last album, Worry Bomb, sounded at times like a battle between the old and new Carters - fast punk guitars fighting strings, brass and keyboard. To a great extent, new Carter won out. The guitar here is less power chord thrash than before, and the emphasis is certainly on melody, although "Road Rage" shows Carter still willing and able to turn the guitars up.
Singer Jim Bob's voice has developed a range previously unknown. From the falsetto of "Nowhere Fast" to the bite of "Road Rage", there's a warmth and drama there that began to show on Worry Bomb. He's as effective a story-teller as anyone out there.
A good couple of years ago, the ever-fickle British press wrote Carter off as an early 90s relic (file under Neds, Wonder Stuff). Wrong then, wrong now. The Sex Machine is as fiercely relevant and as devastatingly spot-on as ever. Carter and label-mate Billy Bragg are the best around when it comes to telling stories about real people, real problems, mundane lives, but always delivered with bite and wit. Nice one. Now the full-length album, please.
