The Sunshine Underground - Raise The Alarm

Review by Chris Waugh

The universe is full of completely inexplicable phenomena such as black holes, the Nazca Plains and Brandon Flowers often sounding as if he's singing with his head stuck in his mum's best vase. Equally incomprehensible is why the hell Leeds' Sunshine Underground don't already stand astride British music like the four-headed funk-rock indie-dance colossus that they are. Whilst this album might misleadingly appear in your iTunes library as 'rock', the songs here alternate between as many different musical flavours as the whole new-rave scene put together.

The single Put You In Your Place may owe a small debt to The Rapture with Craig Wellington's brilliant, high pitched, powerful vocals and, elsewhere, the odd cowbell; but such comparisons soon pale as the album veers from dancey new wave (Panic Attack) to ticking electronic melancholy (Somebody's Always Getting On The Way) and two-tone The Way It Is

On the next album the boys have sardonically, sarcastically and knowingly threatened to chuck away their guitars (as per LCD Soundsystem's missive in Losing My Edge) and "buy a synthesizer and an arpeggiator", but there's really no need 'cos, with the likes of the great Dead Scene and Raise The Alarm, there are beats and grooves here in abundance.

And the anthemic, rabble-rousing Borders? certainly gives the aforementioned Mr Flowers
a proper walloping at his own game.

Without doubt though Commercial Breakdown steals the show with its angry social commentary, wry lyrical substance and kick up the arse stop-start chorus.

This is quintessentially British disco-punk. Party music in excelsis. If you can't find it in yourself to go mad and get sweaty to this, you need a break!

As the t-shirts boldly declare "Everything is brilliant in Leeds". On this showing you're f***ing right it is.