Rare Vitamin Records – 20th October 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
The Battery Farm have had a truly extraordinary twelve months: the Manchester foursome released their debut album last November, and have been gigging hard off the back of it, with some pretty high-profile shows along the way. And this is a band that’s driven – not so much by ambition or aspirations of stardom, but by passion. These guys are purveyors of political, pissed off, authentic punk – not haircuts and threads, but sweaty, full-throttle 110% all the way. Benjamin Corry makes for a powerful presence, vocally, visually, and in the interviews he’s given. He may appear a shade scary and borderline deranged, but comes across as affable, articulate, and genuine.
The band exists to rail against the shitness of the world we find ourselves in, and perhaps buoyed by the reception of the album and recent shows, their twelfth single is more amped-up and fiery than ever. ‘House of Pain’ is three minutes of riff-driven fury that blasts in at a hundred miles an hour with a message that needs to be heard. Arguably, that message could be boiled down to the barest bones of ‘fuck this bullshit’, but the expanded articulation is that it addresses ‘the shame imposed on all of us who are scraping by in an ongoing and worsening cost of greed crisis. You do what you have to to survive, and how dare anyone in a position of privilege look down their nose.’
It needs to be heard because, as I was reading only earlier today online in The Guardian, ‘The number of people experiencing destitution in the UK has more than doubled in the last five years – up from 1.55 million in 2017. One million children are now living in destitute homes – a staggering increase of 186% in half a decade.’ That every single supermarket now has a place to donate to food banks speaks for itself; yet our government, whose job it is to protect society’s most vulnerable, simply dispense advice that if you can’t afford a cheese sandwich, to forgo the cheese, and who seem to think that broadband and mobile phones are luxury items the poor should do without, despite the fact it’s impossible to apply for jobs or even maintain benefits without them. The privately-educated governing elite are in the pockets of the likes of the oil industry, and they absolutely fucking hate the poor, and they want you to hate the poor too. And their hateful campaigning and sloganeering is depressingly effective: how else do you explain working-class people voting Conservative? It’s bewildering to think that people in impoverished towns in the north of England would vote for these cunts who’d happily bulldoze every council estate in the country, that they might think that the likes of Bozo Johnson and Richboi Sunak give even a flake of shit about them, let alone represent them – but the increasingly right-wing Tories appeal to the mentality of the impoverished and disenfranchised by apportioning the blame for the state of everything on ‘illegal’ immigrants, who come over here and sponge all the benefits. Stop the boats! Right. Then what?
The Battery Farm are spot on when they describe the current situation in the UK as a ‘cost of greed’ crisis. Everyone who’s already in the money is making on this: banks, oil and energy companies, supermarkets… any increases in costs are being passed directly to customers, and then some, all to protect profits, all to pass on to shareholders, all to give CEOs even bigger bonuses. The injustice, the social division is at a point where something has to give. Sadly, it seems that something is the lives of those at the bottom of the heap.
The Battery Farm can’t change the world, but they can provide a voice and an outlet to the anger at this injustice, and flipside ‘A Time of Peace’ is another full-throttle gritty blast of punk fury, reminiscent of the sound of ‘79/’80 – I’m thinking grimy roar of The Anti-Nowhere League and fellow Mancunians Slaughter and the Dogs by way of references here.
At the time of writing this, four days after release (I’ve been slack / drowning in dealing with everyday life stuff (delete as appropriate); physical copies on 7”, CD, and cassette have sold out, which is a huge achievement and shows just how they’ve built a committed following through a combination of belting tunes and sheer hard slog. This is their strongest work to date.
AA
Aural Aggravation 