Firmly established by this point as one of the best live bands in the UK (or if they’re not, they damn well should be), the release of a new record from Grey Hairs is always a happy event around these parts, and, just like second LP ‘Serious Business’ from a few years back, third proper full length ‘Health & Social Care’ is both a huge leap forward for their recorded sound and clearly their best one yet, suggesting a happy future for the Hairs as one of those groups who just get better and better, doggedly honing their craft as the years go by. (As I get older, I like those bands the best.)

Opener ‘Hydropona’ is an absolute f-ing kaiju monster of a track, swinging on a slo-mo wrecking ball groove that any contemporary doom band would kill for. ‘Piss Transgressor’* is a more concentrated blast of dissonant, unholy multi-tracked chaos, Chris Summerlin’s guitar-work as always delivering consummate, imaginative brutalism, and third track ‘Ghost In Your Own Life’ finds them opening up into a weirdly menacing kind of wavo pop, speaking distantly perhaps to the band’s oft-mentioned veneration of the B-52s…? I mean, it’s always been lurking in there somewhere, but they’re pushing it to the fore here, and it… works?

Compositionally, the band apply themselves here to conveying the challenges of working in the boiler-rooms of the increasingly crippled NHS whilst keeping body and soul together on those bleak winter trudges between work, pub, practice space and home. I love Nottingham dearly, but, spend a few hours there, wondering beyond the city centre, and you’ll get the idea. More than ever, frontman James – tightening up his Proper Rock Vocalist delivery here without losing any of his compelling idiosyncrasy - hedges the precise verbiage of his lines with impressionistic obscurity, whilst simultaneously ensuring that the intended feel is communicated loud and clear.

Just take ‘Tory Nurse’ for example, which defuses the easy polemic promise of its button-pushing title with hazy evocations of “slowing switching off”, “the sun keeps spinning” etc – yet still somehow leaves us in no fucking doubt as to the content of the spiked ball of mixed up emotion the band wish to lob in the direction of said nurse. There’s a gnarled kind of alchemy here, an avoidance of the obvious fused with a desperate howling of the totally-fucking-obvious, which has informed the best electric guitar n’ drums type music ever since Chuck Berry was first put in handcuffs.

At the risk of repeating myself from past reviews, Grey Hairs make proper modern rock music, reclaiming that horribly loaded phrase from a place of the map which finds it bracketed between moustache-twiddling sub-genre re-enactment societies and shit that sounds like The Foo Fighters. In doing so, they stare down cold the expected bandwagon of influences, they address the world in which we live with honesty and insight, they conduct their band business with integrity, and, they rock, in a manner both profound and disconcertingly literal.

If you find yourself sick of a life full of dodgy cabling and dented speaker cabs, crowded dark rooms full of pints and germs, please listen to ‘Health & Social Care’, and remind yourself what the point is.

Grey Hairs bandcamp is here.

Buy this record directly from Gringo here.

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* This song’s grindcore-esque title was eloquently elaborated upon in the text of a now-difficult-to-link-to press release, as follows: “..seeing yourself in failing men. Standing next to each other in pub toilets dispelling your body waste together. It's a symbiotic moment that is rarely comfortable. It's about the fear of becoming the other. The lines get blurred as we remember our younger selves and times when pop culture was less prescient and that the streams should never cross. The streams have crossed and what now?”

Labels: album reviews, Grey Hairs