Album Review: Male Eunuch by The Pre New

After their occasionally tentative debut, Music For People Who Hate Themselves, The Pre New’s The Male Eunuch is a dark, brash snapshot of Great Britain in the 21st Century: the aural equivalent of one of the warning photos put on the back of fag packets. Taking a musical palette that alternates between krautock, EDM, metal and glam, and then fusing it with snatches of spoken-word, poetry and walls of guitar, The Pre New are making some of the most original music in this country right now. Flaccid Astronaut manages to sound both terribly sad and insidiously sinister (“My uncle was bombed by terrorists, when all I wanted was to work at Joderell Bank and leave the bank and find out what life was”); while Janet Vs John – the tale of a spouse breaking into the old marital home – offers the album’s most tuneful moment, while swiping at gender politics, Farrow & Ball and ASOS.

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Earl Brutus were, by some distance, the most improbable beneficiaries of the Britpop goldrush. Indeed, their brief sojourn on a major label may be the high-water mark of the insanity that gripped the music industry in the wake of Oasis and Blur’s success: it’s not just that their music was wildly uncommerical – a frenzied splurge of bovver-booted glam, noisy electronics and bellowed vocals – but that Earl Brutus appeared to oppose everything that made Britpop popular. In an era defined by the optimism of Oasis’s Live Forever, one of Earl Brutus’ musical calling cards was titled Life’s Too Long.

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That revolution we were told about never was shown on the telly after all. It was ostracised, anaesthetised by important men in suits (posh ones, like from Next), killed off by guys with big ideas and small willies, hell bent on selling you the Riverside Apartment Dream, a tiny box with exposed brick and aesthetically pleasing soft furnishings that can be all yours, just 350k. Now, there's a new machine to rally against, and this is where The Male Eunuch kicks in, The Pre New's second album that has them kicking against the pricks in a gloriously grumpy old man kind of way.

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If the release of their second album was not deliberately scheduled for the week after the general election, then the Pre New must at least have relished its timing. Not because they're political – at least, not in the manner of their peers Sleaford Mods – but because an election pulls into focus value systems and raises questions about purpose, signification and identity, all of which are very much on the Pre New agenda. But if that suggests five finger waggers with a Barthes fixation, then… hardly.

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