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Your support makes all the difference.Brixton's finest continue to spread their own peculiar 21st-century gospel of temptation and redemption on Power in the Blood, with the now-familiar blend of country, funk, house and blues applied not just to hedonist parables like "Strobe Life" and "The Devil Went Down to Ibiza" – which finds one thrill-seeker going "from the powder to the pipe in less than a week" – but to more specifically political targets, as they lambast governmental duplicity in the title track, and nationalism in "Woody Guthrie": "Don't need no country/ Don't fly no flag/ Cut no slack for the Union Jack/ Stars and Stripes have got me jetlagged". It's mostly smart, free-thinking stuff, sharp in both attitude and design: a five-song sequence of outlaw songs towards the album's close, for instance, builds on the success of their Sopranos theme, displaying just as much ambivalence about crime as it moves from the faux-Western romanticism of "Yellow Rose" and "Bullet Proof" through a subdued cover of Springsteen's "Badlands" to the mother's mourning of her dead criminal son in "Lord Have Mercy". As ever, few punches are pulled and few illusions sustained for long, despite the occasional lapse into questionable whimsy. Twelve-step hypocrites are chided in "R.E.H.A.B." for replacing one crutch with another ("No method no guru no teacher for me/ I got no faith in no fantasy"), though the most pointed critique of modern life clings to the gambling metaphor of "Year Zero", where gangsta attitude gets its just deserts: "When every winner is a villain/ And every loser is a hero/ We'll put on our two-step shoes and lose the blues/ And dance like it's year zero."
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