Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 20/6/05
Label: WEA

Musicians react differently to the backhanded compliment that is being 'big in Japan'. Some feel bitter towards their cloth-eared, unappreciative homeland; some retreat smiling into their cultish niche buoyed up by memories of screaming oriental schoolgirls; some move to Tokyo. The Ordinary Boys - let's give them credit - stare their domestic unhipness square in the face. They know they are so far from being UK critics' darlings they might as well do a duet with Lisa Scott-Lee. But do they care?

On the evidence of this, their second album in as many years, not one iota. No multi-syllable nouns, no plangent cello solos, no desire to have any impact whatsoever on the G8 summit. The Worthing rockers are bumptious and defiant in this party bag of dropped consonants, air-punching choruses and every-lad sentiment, and confident in the enduring loyalty of their fans. Witness the album's title - an adjective meaning 'entrenched', we are informed, which often prefixes the words 'party loyalists'. Then there's 'Ronseal'esque playground chant "A Call To Arms" which exhorts their "boys" to sing along with lines like: "All for one/We will never crumble…/Sing ba-ba-da-ba-da'".

And the "boys" are, indeed, rewarded with exactly what they want. With producer Stephen Street - who brings a characteristically English touch to proceedings and whose hand is especially discernible on the vaguely Smithsy ballad "Red Letter Day"- the dewy-cheeked four-piece resurrect the 1970s white ska world of The Specials, The Jam et al with varying degrees of success.

The agreeable opening title track opens with church bell chimes on a piano, before breaking into a bouncy lump of buzzsaw with some fine drum rolls and fills from new drummer Simon Goldring. "Boys Will Be Boys" is pure Madness (complete with cascading horns and a middle-eight rap from Rankin' Junior) and a neat distillation for the "boys" of what maketh, exactly, a boy ("We cheat and we lie/And we fight, we don't cry", apparently). "Life Will Be The Death Of Me" is The Clash.

In short, one big wa-hey of blokey bonhomie that might have been written especially for "Big Brother"'s Maxwell.

    by Anna Britten