LET THE TRIBE INCREASE

Johnny Waller

FIRST POINT -- The Mob are not a bunch of musical Lennie Bennett's and Ted Rodgers' . . . they are not a bundle of laughs.

Second point -- thank Christ for point one!

The Mob are stark, strained and deadly serious. Their lyrics confront the utter awful depression and degradation of everyday life where alienation and isolation without love are so dwarfingly dominant.

Like theives in the night, light dirty vagabonds clutching a grubby, stained scrap of paper bearing the single word TRUTH, The Mob sneak in on you when you're not looking, but you sense their presence and will never forget them once they've left.

'Let The Tribe Increase' is a massively impressive calling card, a blackened, charred picture of the world's ills all swept away from sight lest they offend us. The Mob must be masochists . . . or realists?

To criticise 'Let. . . ' for its lack of humour would be akin to dismissing 'Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs' due to its lack of sex -- true, but irrelevant. Yet for all their concerned solemnity, The Mob are stilll more appealing than apalling, and 'Let. . . ' has a mesmerising fascination that makes it impossible to ignore.

Despite such oppresive titles as 'Another Day Another Death', 'Gates Of Hell' and 'Witch Hunt', the music is surprisingly -- and stunningly -- accessible, with every twist of vocal venom as clear as a (hell's) bell.

Mostly, The Mob disregard the furious thrash punk of their contemporaries, preferring to convey their feelings of despair, fear and disgust via a loping, aggressive mid-paced punk which sounds like a Clash/Buzzcocks hybrid played at half-speed. Sounds weird, but works brilliantly!

Overall, 'Let The Tribe Increase' carries the frightening aura of a Carpenter film set in a decaying UK (Escape From Milton Keynes?), with The Mob as aware but terrified would be heroes, reluctant yet forced by circumstance to stand and fight.

'Let The Tribe Increase' is terrifyingly abrupt in its fierce confrontation. There are no jokes, no love stories, no happy endings.

In the end, there is only music . . . and hope.

And The Mob.
 

Tony D

THE MOB offer a primal creativity built from three chords and brooding, psychedelic rhythms, played devoid of pretence for anyone willing to listen, for free in countless parks, schools and playpits.

In their lyrical imagery they create and describe a world vivid yet vague, a world peopled by tribes facing nightmarish horrors of oppression, clutching no weapons save their own courageous love.

The Mob represent the ragged and reluctant heroes laughing in the face of the apocalypse, and now there's long playing evidence!

On their own All The Madmen label they draw from past experience to combine many disparate elements. A reworking of their cult classic 'Witch Hunt' rubs shoulders with improvised frivolity. Other old favourites merge into simple refrains like the two chord ending to to side one, a sound that grips you in its chill.

This Yeovil based trio upped sticks a couple of years back to bring their brand of furious folk into the harsh light of the big city.

Disillusionment soon came after the release of their 'No Doves Fly Here' single on Crass Records last year. A fragile plea for emotional sanity in post-holocaust terms, it was a refreshingly atypical gem from the then newly founded Crass stable. Crass's short-lived illusion of open-house policy was soon swamped under a tide of one-dimensional, one-chord, one-slogan, one-reality bands sounding ever more forced than forceful.

Realising the simplistic beauty in a rhythm that doesn't tediously hammer, that 'relentless' doesn't always have to mean fast. The Mob scavenged in the ruins to show that emotionally caring was a political act, deeper than any empty ranting, marrying it to a a stance of passive resistance that bursts through magnificently in their music:

"No Time for Hate if they come in the morning.
No time young mother for mourning.
No time for turning or running away.
Or for crying young babies in the morning." -- 'Cry Of The Morning'

Vocal exhortations come from Mark Mob, not so much singing as pleading, stumbling, celebrating glimmers of love and hope, mirrored in the intensity seeping through the musically ragged edges of the melody.

A choppy guitar offers a weaving and driving rhythm, bringing the songs to climactic, crescendo finishes. Visions flicker, threatening to break through at any given moment.

Here are evocative images unafraid of fragility and optimism, the freedom of a madness which places more value on concerned awareness than on whys and wherefores of political theory, a vociferous causes belaboured elsewhere in the anarcho-punk carnival.

Lines evoking the bloody despair of, "our life our world, mapped out in scars, carved on wrists and back of arms" ('Our Life Our World') balance out the beauty of lines like "clutching flowers thrown in the breeze, they are quite meaningless yet they mean so much to me" ('Another Day Another Death'). Cynical derision is easily aimed but just as easily brushed aside---simply by the passion that snaps the 'positive', 'anarcho' punk limitations beneath which The Mob could be imprisoned.

"The wild and tortured dream,
the straw that broke the camel's back" -- 'Another Day Another Death'

Somewhere The Mob are laughing, perhaps you can too.

Mick Mercer

As dusk approached the reviewer reclined, inflamed by passion, in his favourite chair. Outside the faltering sunlight caught the ivy leaves surrounding the conservatory window. Inside the coal fire crackled in the grate and the subdued gas lamp gave off a faintly audible hiss.

The reviewer's gramophone was turned up loud, for living on the moors there were no neighbours to issue complaints. The record that he played had him quite baffled. What an extraordinary thing it is, he mused, when bands develop so unexpectedly in leaps and bounds, unnoticed by the human ear.

So it was with hill dwellers The Mob. From their constellation of consternation they were proving that ragged clothes can be warm. They crept up on him, pinned him down securely in the chair and then busied themselves about the room whilst he was powerless to resist. In the hands of The Mob!

They buffeted him with their music and their great big naked vocal cry, suprising so much with their opening two tracks, "Wake Up Screaming" and "If They Come In The Morning" that the reviewer demanded they start all over again. "Wake Up Screaming"

Here were The Mob, a No Man's Band, all too welcome to stamp "Red Blooded Man" into his carpet, their devotion to aromatic cheese toast legendary but their heritage somewhat murky. Two singles and a sparse list of appearances being nothing to predict their eventual capabilities.

As they made themselves comfortable by the fire, "Raised In A Prison" span around the cosy room. Ticking off society while winking coyly with the Crass camp, they are capable of far more than The People In Black will ever be, for although their ideology is similar their melodic approach finds a wider appeal. The voices imply honesty and committment. The reviewer's smile was a wistful one.

Death crops up. The death of a State, and "Gates of Hell" is riddled with such imagery. the reviewer squirmed in his bondage as the bass line sounded suspiciously Pink Floyd.

Say it isn't so lads, say it isn't so.