Album: Chumbawamba

Readymades, Republic/Universal

With the album Readymades, Chumbawamba bring a new slant to sampling, borrowing not the usual beats or basslines but vocal refrains from folk songs, using the worldly authority of Northern voices such as Lal Waterson, Kate Rusby and particularly the trio Coope Boyes & Simpson to illuminate their issues. It's an interesting stratagem, the folk voices starkly silhouetted against the band's faux-naïf harmonies and shuffling electropop settings, recurrent reminders of the need to learn from history in order not to repeat it. The sweep of history here is broad and deep, ranging from the shooting of Harry Stanley by armed police who thought the table-leg he was carrying was a sawn-off shotgun ("Without Rhyme or Reason") back through the Spithead mutiny of 1797 ("Salt Fare, North Sea") to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 ("If It Is to Be, It Is up to Me"). Taken as a whole, the broadsides make up a lesson in comparative political expediency: 19th-century child labour reforms are contrasted with the sweatshop origins of modern fashion in "Sewing up Crap", and Putin's refusal to let foreign rescue teams save submariners on the sunken Kursk presented as an echo of Churchill's refusal to rescue over 1,500 drowning sailors in "Jacob's Ladder" – the latter spiralling into the deep on a loop of Davy Graham's guitar classic "Anji".