Credit: Found On Internet

This debut album from The Enemy could almost be described as a concept album. No, not because they’ve blindsided everyone and recorded a double-album of Norse dragon-slayer sagas. No, what they’ve done is squeeze out 11 songs solely concerned with the suburban defeat facing kids with no future. It’s the decay of regional identity in the face of multinational homogenisation….only screw the fancy words: this is a musical V-sign to people who’s sole highlight in life is drowning out their working week on Friday night down the pub.

Frontman Tom Clarke is a mouthy little gobshite – like rock stars should be. But his vitriolic diatribe isn’t just for human snotrags like Peaches Geldof – you can really feel the depth of contempt he has for people who accept 9-to-5 no-ambition no-future as the be-all and end-all that life has to offer.

There’s a beery terrace chant joy in the chorus of ‘Away From Here’, the trio’s paean to abandoning the working week for something better. But after 40 minutes of hearing variations on the same theme, it begins to grate. Yes, we’re all aware that our lives as slaves to the wage is depressing, but being lectured on it by someone who’s only just able to legally buy liquor and has only had the barest taste of the Monday-to-Friday mundanities….let’s just say it rankles after a while.

But maybe I’m just old and bitter. Maybe The Enemy are just naïve – after all, they’re the lucky three who might just attain their dream of sidestepping everyday tedium for something better. Maybe if I were their age, this record would sound like a call to arms. Certainly, ‘Had Enough’ has that echo of first failed small-town relationships, that everyone has an anecdote for, and to which everyone can nail their own personal backstory.

While he sound of The Jam can be heard clattering in between the beats and bangs of the band’s collection of four-minute missives (and especially the album’s title track), it’s impossible to listen to The Enemy without hearing the some spectre of Arctic Monkeys. If someone forged a mash-up of an Alex Turner soliloquy and a Doves single, it’d be ‘This Song’, which I guess the Coventry trio have slotted in to show there’s more to them than sneer and bluster. But it just ends up just reinforcing the image of their magpie scavenging of other people’s sounds, and the fact that if it wasn’t for the zeitgeist the Monkeys created, we’d probably have never heard of The Enemy.