Soft Play - ‘Heavy Jelly’
20th July 2024
The Artists Formerly Known As Slaves have been MIA since the release of 2019’s EP ‘The Velvet Ditch’. Since then, tragic personal loss and mental health crises led to a long hiatus, where it seemed doubtful that the unlikely chart-toppers would even return.
But now the Tunbridge Wells lads are back, with a new album and a new name -’Soft Play’. This fresh moniker led to some derision online, with some more macho fans complaining at the supposedly PC course correction that the name change indicated. Soft Play are quick to mercilessly mock them on the track ‘Punk’s Dead’, complete with crying baby sounds, audio snippets of online critics and derisive refrains of ‘I don’t like change!’ The song demonstrates that Isaac Holman’s sardonic sense of humour is very much intact:
“Johnny Rotten is turning in his bed, I was gonna say grave, but the fucker ain’t dead”
However, this vitriol starts to come across a little insecure, and the extreme sound of the record starts to feel like cope, a slightly childish middle-finger to those doubting their punk credentials. The whole point of punk is that you don’t care what people think, but Soft Play seem to feel they have a lot to prove. The album is blistering, the guitars feedbacking and distorting wildly, the riffs primitive and bare-bones. Isaac’s vocals are limited almost exclusively to throat-rending screaming. It’s a rip-roaring hardcore manifesto, but the band sound poorer for it unfortunately.
Much of their appeal was the combination of punk energy, catchy songwriting and cheeky injections of humour. Much of the fun of their earlier records is completely gone in favour of pure aggression without much focus. There are some highlights, including the hyperactive ‘Acting Violently’, which is bolstered by Laurie Vincent’s staccato guitar and smooth backing vocals. The album closer, the mandolin-strumming ‘Everything and Nothing’, shows Isaac really bearing his soul, his impassioned vocals almost stray into Liam Gallagher territory. The self-reflection is mirrored by the obvious sonic comparison to REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’.
Whilst Isaac and Laurie have always stayed pretty apolitical, the focus of the lyrics is conspicuously mundane, with lyrics about taking out the bins (‘Bin Juice Disaster’), going to the gym (‘Mirror Muscles’) and movie references (‘John Wick’).
It seems quite disingenuous to on one hand deride the so-called fans angry at the ‘woke’ name change, but to then also produce an album so vitriolic-sounding without making any comment on the dire social situation in the UK right now. There really has never been a better time for some socially-conscious punk commentary for us denizens of the dystopian hellscape that is 2020s Britain. it would have been great to hear Soft Play skewer the powers that be a little more, rather than disloyal fans. While it’s great to have them back, it would be good to get less punk and more substance on their next release.