Blue Aeroplanes – Culture Gun – album review

My tiny mind is blown. I thought Last Night From Glasgow had reached their zenith early this year with Hifi Sean and David McAlmont. Then along came Culture Gun. I must have listened to Side A at least half a dozen times before I even managed to flip over to Side 2, the four songs on the first side offering so much, it was hard for me to take it all in on the first listen. Raw energy. Commentary on the state of society. Impassioned vocals. Tunes which veer from boisterous and rambunctious to beatific and thought-provoking. Lets face it, Gerard Langley and Co. have managed to cram more into Hips Like Cigarettes, the first song on the album, than many bands out there have managed to crowbar into a whole career. And that is just the tip of the iceberg…

They follow it with Waking Up in the Ghost Removal Van with its furiously turbulent questioning chorus… a further song of questioning closes side one with the gorgeously mesmeric and spine tinglingly affecting Apostle Spoons and its bittersweet closing couplet “”life is always beautiful, oh yes we know, but its not always pretty, not pretty at all”

I was overjoyed when the LNFG offshoot Past Night From Glasgow re-released the bands classic Swagger album, complete with extra tracks. A album whose title says it all. The band have such a complexity to everything they do, from their multi layered music to Gerard’s mindblowing lyrics, but all done with such a seemingly effortless cool. Much hard work goes into sounding that effortless, so the swagger of the band doesn’t come from a big headed conceited arrogance, it is clearly from a place of extreme talent.

While I was naval gazing and comtemplating what to write about Culture Gun in a COVID induced haze, I yearned for the past, mainly because of the way the industry and the 21st century disrespects music and doesn’t give artists who make music as utterly compelling as The Blue Aeroplanes the platform they deserve. Yes, I sound like auld curmudgeon, but I’ll have my say anyway. Where are the TV shows to promote new alternative music? Blue Aeroplanes specifically made me think of this, I’m pretty sure If it wasn’t for shows like (and specifically in the case of this band) Snub TV, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have fallen so hard for their music. People will to tell me I could discover loads of new music on Spotify, don’t get me started on that shit show, the anti-platform for helping new bands, disrespecting the bands and artists with a pittance while fat cats line their pockets.

While I’m on my high horse, I often come across people who try to tell me they like their music and politics to be separate. Their music should be there to entertain. I get that. But why cut your nose off to spite your face? Why can’t it be both? I’m a lyric person and I love nothing more than a band with something to say. This record is an undoubtedly highly charged political statement, but it is also one of the most highly entertaining and deeply engaging records I’ve listened to in a long time. This album has more punk attitude in its first few bars than the current comedy act The Exploited could muster in an entire worldwide tour.

The stunning wordsmithery, the overwhelmingly beautiful and sublimely exalted nature of the music on Culture Gun comes from the convergence of like-minded souls to make a sound so expressive and words so eloquent that they often defy lucid and creditworthy description. Morrissey and The Smiths were oft lauded for Stephen Patrick’s lyrics and Marr’s guitars. As a band and as a songwriter, Blue Aeroplanes and Langley deserve these plaudits, I’ve now lost count of just how many times I’ve listened to Culture Gun (all the way through – I did make it past side 1) and every single time, it gives me something new. Whether that be a little lyrical couplet I missed, a wry observation on life, or a riff, or noteworthy passage of music that I hear with new ears when I re-listen. How Langley fits so much into a song I’ll never get my head round. It is not only the sheer volume of words, but the emotion, the meaningfulness, the darkly humourous observations on life in Tory Britain in the 21st Century “its fucking Dickensian man”.

I’m too old now to make old cliches like in days of yore, the music of The Smiths saved my life and such, but music, such as the 10 nigh on peerless tracks on Culture Gun, still has the ability to move and inspire (the compelling and engaging 20/20), to fill with righteous anger and high emotion (on the aforementioned epic call to arms of Hips Like Cigarettes), to get you out of your seat with a high spirited fervour (songs like the grungey REM-like, Someone (In the Arms of No-one), and the high spirited (An Unlikely Hit of) Adoration) and to reminisce with rose tinted spectacles (the countrified Half a Crown). There are so many multi-layered, many textured songs on this album it is impossible to take everything from them on first listen, case in point is the energetic driving rhythms contained in Building An Ark for the Anthropocene, a commentary on the humanity caused planetary decay complete with throbbing bass break, and including a plethora of astute observations and shrewd lyrical couplings.

As a country it feels like we are too apathetic, we take everything lying down, maybe we’ve been beaten down over the years. As Langley narrates dryly at the end of Hips Like Cigarettes “The next revolution will not be televised, it will be streamed, pay per view, and it won’t work properly”. An analogy for the current apathetic state that much of society has been reduced to.

How powerful is music? I don’t know, maybe it is this album, or maybe not, but my COVID symptoms feel as if they are clearing, and I’m totally pumped with adrenaline. I want to take to the streets. I want to shout from the rooftops that we’re not going to take this shit anymore. Fight for a fairer society. Lets get Culture Gun on school syllabuses, lets play it in supermarkets and offices. Lets get people giving a fuck again. Lets reclaim for society what is rightfully ours from rich elite before the gap between the haves and have nots widens ever further (a subject tackled in the haunting album closer Lapdogs in the Wild, clarinet adding a layer of emotive portent)

Jeez, I might need a lie down now…

One last note, a get well wish for a speedy recovery to Blue Aeroplanes main man, Gerard Langley.

Order the album now from Last Night From Glasgow (release date 28th April)

The album launch gig in Glasgow has been rescheduled to Fri 22nd Sep and in Stereo (22-28 Renfrew Lane).