Send "Levellers " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Musicomh |
 The perennial issue of mixing politics and music rears its sometimes problematic head once again with Levellers' first full length in four years, Letters From The Underground. Mixing pop and politics is nearly always a tough one to judge because there's not much worse than Bob Geldof or Bono getting on their knackered and thoroughly downtrodden high horses. Lee Ryan of Blue certainly runs them close though, after he proclaimed "Who gives a fuck about New York when elephants are being killed?" after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Ahem. Thankfully, Levellers are far enough detached from either of the above cases that the thorny issue doesn't matter; it just wouldn't be the Levellers without the content being politically and socially charged, would it? That said, the main problem with political albums such as Letters From The Underground is not that it's a struggle to believe the veracity of the sentiments expressed, but that those same sentiments have a tendency to be just too bog-standard, and song entitlement such as Burn America, Burn, and Accidental Anarchist do very little to refute this. When an album so overtly political as this is made, bands open themselves up to appearing to be no better than every sixth-form socialist with a guitar in the country....full text |
| Guardian |
| More a touring outfit these days - it has been three years since their last album, and eight since they reached the album chart - the Levellers have brought the manic Celt-rock energy of their live show to Letters from the Underground. Fiddler Jon Sevink's emphatic sawing is at the forefront of nearly every track, reaching such a pitch of intensity that the rest of the band scramble to keep up. It can be exhilarating to hear them ride punkily roughshod over each other - more typically, though, it sounds like the kind of tedious knees-up that follows the consumption of multi-packs of cider. But the message is robustly political, with Darfur, the Virginia Tech shootings and the 7/7 bombings among the topics used as fodder for their one-dimensional anthems. The nostalgic Behold a Pale Rider speaks volumes: the Levellers are forever marooned in 1993, when "crusty" was a lifestyle choice, not a bread roll....full text |
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