Album review: Imperial Leisure – The Art Of Saying Nothing

As an album title, The Art Of Saying Nothing could easily refer to the post-Millennial decline of ska-punk into a cartoon of itself, a seemingly endless cavalcade of identikit rebel politics and recycled horn sections spiralling downward into something even worse than mediocrity. Even taken closer to home, it’s a brave title for any band to use; Imperial Leisure must be pretty sure that they’ve got something on their début record that can stand up to the obvious retorts.

And it sounds to me like they’re right – and that’s coming from someone who became thoroughly sick of ska-punk through overexposure to its most obvious clichés. While The Art Of Saying Nothing brings no novelties to the table – rasping brass, cheeky chatty rapping and a smattering of turntable trickery, all been done before – Imperial Leisure have imbued it with enough energy to get away with it. Mixing things up a bit with respect to tone and tempo helps a great deal, too, and thankfully Imperial Leisure know more than one rhythm, with their chicken-scratch guitars shuffling loosely around the beats more often than pogoing rigidly in between them. End result? An album of twelve tracks that don’t sound like they were cloned in a South Korean laboratory from a single shred of DNA.

Imperial Leisure score points for accessibility also; by avoiding the shouty stuff and delivering wry humour in clear yet character-laden voices, they’ve appropriated the formula that Reel Big Fish made so popular without sounding like an imitation. It’s the oft-overlooked trick of being yourself: Imperial Leisure rap, but they don’t feel any need to sound Californian while they’re doing it. Nor (unlike fellow Londoners The King Blues, for instance) do they feel the need to ape black music in a bid for authenticity; its incorporation is assumed, a given, and so much smoother as a result.. The Art Of Saying Nothing sounds like what you might have got had the kids from Grange Hill grown up into a band; a little overstated, certainly, but endearingly anarchic as well as distinctly British.

Imperial Leisure really do have something to say, as well – albeit telling the sort of darkly comic stories about life at the bottom of the financial ladder that Capdown did well before developing pretentions of upward mobility. “In A Letter” is a decent stab at a Dear John response song, its droning organ and lively pace a nod towards The Teardrop Explodes, while “The Beast” is closer to the centre-line of punk with its raucous guitars and driving rhythm… not to mention a chorus hook to kill for.

Of course, The Art Of Saying Nothing is still a ska album, and the obligatory mariachi brass raises its head on the stumbling midnight post-club dub of “Alperton”, which could have done without the scratching but is utterly redeemed by the mournfully dead-pan chorus refrain of “that’s what you get… for being a wanker“. Time and time again, Imperial Leisure roll out a tired trope and then lift themselves off the hook by making you grin or wince… or sometimes both at once. The Art Of Saying Nothing captures all that was potentially good about ska-punk, and it’s a shame it didn’t arrive six years ago.

And guess what? Not one cheekily ironic cover of an eighties pop song. Result.