Like all well-behaved dance acts, Audio Bullys have developed the habit of producing a killer first single – the Nancy Sinatra-sampling 'Shot You Down' – and following it with an album of less in-your-face material which weeds out the fairweather chart fans.
With plenty of urban anfums contained in their follow up to Ego War, one could draw a comparison with The Streets, but that wouldn’t take into account the worryingly large spectrum of beats, samples, tempos, layers and kitchen sinks musicmeister Tom Dinsdale uses on Generation, and that Mike Skinner’s still toying with. One minute they’re heavy on the string arrangements and hip hop (‘Made Like That’), the next they’re background music for a late-night sesh (‘I’m In Love’).
Whatever their mood of the moment is, the lyrics, the responsibility of Tom’s other half Simon Franks, make it the perfect soundtrack for a Guy Ritchie film. Franks vividly depicts the mean city life – take for example “I wasn’t there/I went out/Out with the boys just hanging about/Acting like louts”. You would almost believe that the part of London in which they reside is the East End, and not the leafy suburb of Richmond.
The biggest question mark hanging over the album like a noose is whether the masses need any more street poetry about urban alientation; in the Bullys’ two-year absence, that topic has moved to the domain of guitar bands like the Kaiser Chiefs and Hard-Fi. Which makes this, like, sooo 2003.