‘Excellent Apples’, the 27th studio album by The Susan Baxter Harvest Band

“The age is in disarray!” shout the aged beardmongers of yesterday. “Kids are running around shaving each other and inhaling bifters of crack-corn!” One of the preferred pastimes of the elderly, the be-yeared amongst our damp generation, is to lambast, undermine and otherwise elbow the soft flanks of Britain’s youth. Rightly or wrongly, and perhaps a little of both, we have been subject of much criticism by the more virulent and mealy-fisted of the megaphonic right-wingery. And nowhere is this more prevalent than in music, the golden angel duckling of the wrinkled toffee-gobbers. “Music was better in our day, and also louder” is the stuck acetate vinyl of the previous generation, a 12” disc doomed to rotate gloopily at the centre of a record cabinet in an abandoned music hall called ‘Wendy’s Grab Parlour’. Peeling posters of groups like The Cloudburst, Bernie & His Beans and Magnus Spank decorate the dusty childhood bedrooms of our forefathers and foreuncles, music makers that de-invented the wheel, put four sides on it, re-attached it to the axle and then put the whole lot in a bin, and whose influence, it cannot be deunderrestimated, can be traced even now to the up-powered reflecto-rock of yesterday’s tomorrow.

And this, begrudgingly, brings me on to The Susan Baxter Harvest Band, a folk throwback outfit that is certainly more ‘out’ than ‘fit’. Their 27th studio album in as many weeks, Excellent Apples is the latest in-and-output by a group who seems to have confused quality with shit and produced something that resembles an album composed almost entirely of the sounds of the same barn door closing a few times and a man standing opposite a bus. Because that is what it is. There are three songs on the album: Hairy Flaxen Sack (a song that, at its best, may be described as being inspired by music), Bug in a Bag (one woman wailing whilst two women wail) and, confusingly, Hairy Flaxen Sack (a song completely different from its similarly-named companion piece on the same album, in the sense that it is 43 seconds of consecutive, identical ‘silent notes’, followed by a recipe for meat). This album is, admittedly, slightly better than their previous ‘re-chord’ (so-named because they claimed to have invented new chords “A-”, “under-B” and “neck” to create the music), entitled Tituba and the Mainstream, a pre-forward psycho-sonorous spurt of idiocracy that actually received negative stars in last week’s Observer. Unless you are dead, avoid this latest dribble by the un-band of 2016. It belongs in a time before ears were invented.

You’ll like this if you like:

• Crop Soil, by Crop Soil

• Take Me By The Nape, by The Mary Attempt

• Neil, Draw The Water, by Brandy Clearleather