2008’s Life Affirming Songs For Those With A Bad Attitude was a criminally overlooked masterpiece which should have catapulted Blade into the limelight. Though as funny and vicious in places, this follow-up fails to be quite as captivating and daring.
Now performing as an animated representation of himself thanks to ArtCrim, Blade both produces and plays everything himself: Car-Bomb is a fantasy attack on the BBC and Geoff Hoon a character assassination in song (successor to Miamo Jihad and Oliver Stone); but it’s Paradise & Below, You Kill Me and Electrified – songs about desire, full of glam-rock guitar, and swirling effects, that are the psychedelic killers.
Elsewhere, Contract (“with the devil”) is a highlight, while a re-imagining of Peter Cook’s Bedazzled, condensed into less than three minutes and with Blade playing the part of Stanley Moon, could have been a sample-strewn hit single in a parallel universe. Of course, only the pop jihadi could write a tender and yearning love song which includes reference to “a nail-bomb in a hijacked plane”. Good as it is, however, Blade’s forthcoming novel is more likely to make him a household name.
