The latest edition of the Getting into series looks at Half Man Half Biscuit’s 6th album, 1997’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Road.
There’s this old Kurt Vonnegut story/quote that periodically does the rounds on social media:
[When Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] “Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?”
And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know.
The moral of the story is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.
There’s something in this that could almost be a mission statement for HMHB. We’ll ignore the fact that if this was a Nigel Blackwell story, it’d be filled with a litany of grievances; he’d have a bad time, the thumbs up would be the wanker gesture, and he’d pen a character assassination of the woman and her dog.
But the bit about farting around pretty much captures HMHB’s whole outlook. They bask in life’s great trivialities. They’re far more concerned with the dim realities of the journey than the destination. Or to be reductive – they just don’t take life that seriously. This approach is their gift and their curse.
By 1997, they’re well into their farting around phase. And, as I hypothesised in the previous edition, that also means we’re amidst a run of diminishing returns. It feels like they’re a bit stuck in a routine at this stage, and there aren’t enough musical detours to keep things fresh here.
It actually begins really promisingly. The heavy industrial pulse of opener, A Shropshire Lad, is a shock to the system and their hardest music to date; imagine The White Stripes’ Icky Thump but a decade earlier and replace the classic rock reverence with disdain.
But the genre experiments elsewhere border on annoying; including a jug band boogie and a Xmas carol. They also lean even further into outright parodies with interpolations of the blues classic See That My Grave Is Kept Clean and the traditional He’s Got the Whole World… I mean, replacing grave with bike is funny, but it’s straying far too close to dreadful Weird Al style musical comedy.
Outside of those, the tunes are solid enough, and a slight upgrade on the previous album. They recapture some of those old hooks that evaded them on Some Call It Godcore. And it’s interesting to note just how spot on some of these characterisations still feel almost 30 years later. The clichéd artistic integrity career move of an Eno Collaboration, the real ale bore from C.A.M.R.A. Man, or the monotonous conformity of corporate buzzword bullshitters as spewed on ITMA.
Voyage is enjoyable enough in a vacuum, if slightly forgettable, and suffers from a sense of sameness as HMHB’s evolution slows to a crawl. If you’ve been following this series then you already know my criticisms so I’ll not repeat myself too much (hence filling out the review with the Kurt Vonnegut bit). Maybe we are just on earth to fart around. But when all you do is fart around, it starts to get boring.
Rating:
Read the next edition, their 7th album – Four Lads Who Shook the Wirral here.
You can catch up on previous editions here.
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