Sweet Revenge

Right on time. By now, I'm told, this magnificent debut album will have carved up the Smiths and the Cocteau Twins and should be shouting angry and proud at the top of the independent charts. That's some going for a record that has hardly been reviewed yet. But this is no run-of-the-dark-satanic-mills slab of vinyl.

`Vengeance` is the most dynamic and exciting mesh of music and personal politics since the first Clash bash and `Inflammable Material`. And it's possibly even better than them, Susan. The real instrumental and polemical triumphs of Slade The Leveller, Stuart Morrow and Rob Heaton's visions are that they make you question the state of your own life. That's awesome.

It's an unpalatable fact that ideological commitment in music too often equals unlistenability and rhetoric which would make a `Morning Star` sub gag. `Vengeance` makes you blush for losing faith. It makes you feel huge inside, forces you to throw a clenched fist in the air and whack an imaginary guitar (not a pretty sight I'm sure).

But that's the record's effect at it's most trivial. More importantly, although many of the songs are written from a parochial and personal viewpoint, they have an internal dialectic linking team to a recognisably obscene outside world, radicalises. It makes you determined to get off the fence.

The production may be a bit one-dimensional and the sound a trifle thin, but cut after cut the potential of New Model Army slaps you in the face. There are moments on this record when I swear I hear a group in motion who will one day be as dominating as u2 and Big Country are in rock.

For rock is what New Model Army play but with an interpretation every bit as individual as Bono and Adamson's outfits, though less deliberately Transcendent. The group's tension is one of a cocked gun pointed at the head of it's lyrical targets, the latter from born again religious hypocrites to you lethargic people in readerland.

But I'll leave you to discover the songs. As a pointer, though, here's a taste from the title track. "I believe in justice, I believe in vengeance, I believe in GETTING THE BASTARD."

Yes, your on time.