Luke Haines
Smash the System
Release Date: Oct 7, 2016
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Cherry Red
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Album Review: Smash the System by Luke Haines
Great, Based on 5 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
To those who know who he is, Luke Haines can do no wrong. When even someone’s music criticism is peerless, this much must be true. To the non-fan, fully comprehending the Haines mystique is both elementary and a conundrum. Haines is a pop songwriter through and through, yet with a vision as singular as his songs are irresistible.
Based on rating 4/5
RC Smash The System. Smash The System.
Based on rating 7.5/10
The advance word on Smash the System is that it’s Luke Haines’ first non-concept album in over half a decade. Because this is Luke Haines, the veracity of that appraisal depends on how exactly you define ‘not a concept album’. There are more plot details in the first minute of Smash the System than have been strung across some entire double albums.
Based on rating 7/10
The ex-Auteurs, Black Box Recorder, and Baader Meinhof mastermind's sixth album in seven years, Smash the System sees Haines ditching the conceptual architecture of past outings in favor of a more singles-oriented, though no less idiosyncratic, collection of new material. Haines, ever the pop culture double agent, spends much of the 12-track set living up to the moniker via sardonic take-downs of fellow industry outsiders like the Incredible String Band, Vince Taylor, and T. Rex, but his bile is tempered by his obvious affinity for his quarry.
Based on rating 3.5
After a loose trilogy pondering Big Daddy et al, a badger called Nick Lowe and New York in the ’70s, the reincarnated form of the artist, writer and pop provocateur Luke Haines – who declared himself dead on a 2005 boxed-set – retreated underground for last year’s British Nuclear Bunkers. Mostly instrumental, and entirely electronic, it was a concept album and so shared something with its predecessors. Here, though, is Smash The System, Haines’ first non-concept album since 2009’s 21st Century Man – although most of Haines’ output since The Auteurs underloved swansong (or should that be the underloved Auteurs’ swansong?) How I Learned To Love The Bootboys has seemed part of some grand, overarching concept; a sinister pre-Scarfolkian weltanschauung where it’s perpetually nineteen-seventy-something.
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