What do you get when you mix members of The Clash, Big Audio Dynamite, Generation X, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Reef? Everyone has a sound in their minds right now—no doubt about it—but, whatever you’re thinking, you’d be wrong. In point of fact that conglomeration is what makes up Carbon/Silicon and, from note one, track one of The Last Post, the band erupts with a stream of easy-to-listen-to but very-confrontational pop that is the aural equivalent of a candy apple: big, rotund, shiny, colorful and sweet with a series of razor blades sunk into it ready to rend the unsuspecting.
While there were always hints of pop mixed into the sounds of those bands on the aforementioned list—The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite in particular—for Carbon/Silicon, Mick Jones and Tony James have boiled off all the surface discontent to leave a purified, sweet solution with which to coat a set of the most starkly and obviously incisive lyrics of their careers that beg for change and revolution—or at least political honesty. A dreamer’s record, The Last Post confronts listeners while simultaneously harboring all the hope in the world.
Because of those involved and the sugar sweet sound they agreed to use to support this manifesto, listeners with immediately recognize Mick Jones’ Clash influence, but Carbon/Silicon goes a step beyond the sloganeering for which The Clash was so revered. Songs including “The News,” “The Whole Truth,” “Tell It Like It Is,” “War On Culture,” “What The F**k” and “Why Do Men Fight?” all take the Combat Rock tack as far as the songs having a campy “Rock The Casbah” pop-punk swing, but the lyrics are far more prescient than anything from that album. The band questions every institution from the clearly biased newscasts force-fed down the throats of the public (“The News,” “National Anthem”) to the dubious ‘war on terror’ (“Oilwell”); from the human condition and its propensity for self-defeat (“Why Do Men Fight?”) to the moral majority’s attempts to homogenize the global population into a single mass with a single vacant stare.
The band doesn’t even attempt to answer those questions because that isn’t their purpose; these songs are designed to be echoed by everyone that hears them at any of the powers that be called to task in them. That’s a very powerful gift and sentiment to offer your audience and, in these dozen tracks, this band of wise men shower listeners with information and tools to fuel change. The Last Post is an almanac of encoded notes to help the politically inclined question the political machine. For those that aren’t politically inclined, it urges them to take a look around because someone’s making a dime off the public’s ignorance while nudging them to ruin. Either way, there’s something for every listener to take away from it.
Want a potentially life-altering experience? Go buy The Last Post; it’ll shake your world to its foundations.
For more information, check out: www.carbonsiliconinc.com
