Yard Act can’t help but recall The Fall with debut album The Overload

Tales of disillusionment and failure in northern England and the Midlands were once the speciality of kitchen-sink dramas, not pop music. While Merseybeat reimagined Liverpool as a colourful hub of youth culture, A Taste of Honey and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning cast the region’s industrial heartlands under a bleak black-and-white pall. Not until the Buzzcocks’ Another Music in a Different Kitchen in 1978 did a kitchen-sink register establish itself in British rock.

Rather than social realism, this variety of northern disaffection was shaped by dry wit and clever lyricism. Indie music was its natural home, a milieu of dingy venues, constrained ambitions and weekly music papers whose poor print quality caused them to be nicknamed “inkies”. The style was honed in the 1980s by another Manchester band, The Smiths, as a Thatcherite scythe was taken to organised labour and manufacturing industries. It continued in the 1990s and 2000s through Sheffield’s Pulp and Arctic Monkeys — and now reaches the present day in the form of Leeds newcomers Yard Act.

Their debut The Overload opens with a steel hawser of a bassline, a discordantly clanging guitar riff and the sardonic voice of singer James Smith drawling “Yeah, yeah yeah”, as though inspecting the blueprint for a Northern Powerhouse policy relaunch. The intro irresistibly recalls The Fall, Salford’s giants of antipathy, whose songs dredged up the grimiest kitchen-sink grot and redeemed it with brilliantly caustic surrealism. They are the imperial unit by which Yard Act have chosen to measure themselves.

Smith’s semi-spoken lyrics are uttered in a dry Yorkshire accent, a cross-Pennine descendant of his namesake, The Fall’s Mark E Smith. Bassist Ryan Needham, drummer Jay Russell and guitarist Sam Shjipstone provide a grumbling, itchy accompaniment to the singer’s tales of provincialism. Scratchy guitar parts unfold against a repetitive post-punk/funk groove. Sudden bursts of energy surge up like flushed cheeks, a sign of underlying purpose.

The title track is based on overheard snippets of conversations in a pub, arranged into absurdist verses. It culminates in Smith delivering a droll monologue in the character of an overbearing regular promising to get a local indie band a gig. In “The Incident”, he assumes the role of cheerfully unethical company boss, the modern equivalent of a heartless factory-owner. “Rich” is a deadpan satire of the psychology of wealth. In this depiction of a society of bad winners and sore losers, comedy is both weapon and refuge. “The last bastion of hope this once-great nation has left is humour,” Smith announces in “Dead Horse”.

“Tall Poppies” is the story of a small-town lothario and crack footballer who never leaves for the big city, instead subsiding into a life of comfortable mediocrity, a suburban kitchen-sink drama. “He wasn’t perfect but he was one of us,” Smith says, betraying a hint of warmth beneath the mockery. Further uplift comes in closing track “100% Endurance”, in which the singer has an epiphany about the value of life while in the throes of a savage hangover. “Death is coming for us all, but not today,” he concludes, finding consolation in hopelessness. The beleaguered tone of optimism sounds forced in the song, but the album as a whole deserves it. The Overload bears the weight of its superbly despondent musical tradition with pride.

★★★★☆

‘The Overload’ is released by Zen FC/Island