Few things are more likely to bring joy, laughter and indeed titular pain relief, especially now, than a new HMHB release, this 15th album decorated again with singalong tunes and the Wirral’s Nigel Blackwell’s incomparably brilliant lyrics, though here with death as a black-humoured running theme. This is the first album since 2018’s No One Cares About Your Creative Hub, So Get Your Fucking Hedge Cut, and the first on the indie band’s own label RM Qualtrough, and with all the events since, the time is more than ripe for Blackwell’s obliquely witty take on the state of things.
Among a wonderful assortment of variously tragic local stories, jokes and wordplay, death indeed comes in all forms from the caustic execution-based I’m Getting Buried In The Morning (“See ya later, undertaker, In a while, necrophile … I’m getting frazzled in the morning, So get me to the chair on time”); the even darker Big Man Up Front about a fatal hit and run accident; Beneath This Broken Headstone, about a frustrated local singer; In a Suffolk Ditch, a sharply amusing revenge fantasy including targets such as former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie; Slipping the Escort which details the painfully funny problems of getting older; and the final, rather moving and profound track Oblong of Dreams, which seems to be about a dying man’s last moments, including the lovely line “clouds part, show time; cowslips and celandine”. But it’s not all about death - even Token Covid Song (of course) ironically escapes that detail, lambasting instead an annoying attention-seeking local singer-songwriter called Lockdown Luke making the most of the situation to bump up his click rate. Grafting Haddock in the George is quintessential HMHB filled with oddball detail and a brass element, while Awkward Sean is the hilarious equivalent to Father Ted’s Father Stone character, but is he still alive? “Keith Muldoon said he was dead, murdered by a giraffe.”
There’s also plenty of pathos-filled humour on relationships, particularly the standout Tess of the Dormobiles, using Blackwell’s classic penchant for a Thomas Hardy reference, here about a mismatched pair, “I was Betamax, you were VHS”, or Rogation Sunday’s Here Again with the superb detail of: “I came downstairs and found your note. ’The greater knapweed near the mugwort by the buckthorn tree is dying. P.S. Yes, I have left you’.” Painfully wonderful. Pass me more Voltarol. To enjoy more HMHB go their website.
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