In the last few years, Getdown Services – the duo of Ben Sadler and Josh Law – have gone from being an underground outfit with a cult following, to selling out entire tours, playing Later… With Jools Holland and being selected to perform as part of Harry Styles’ Meltdown festival. Since forming “accidentally” in lockdown, the pair – originally from Minehead and now based in Bristol – soon grew a reputation for playing raucous high-octane shows, usually shirtless and dripping in sweat, while performing a concoction of genre-fluid tunes that range from slick electro to lo-fi garage rock, with lyrics that are ironic and irreverent, as well as surreal and silly.
Given the project was originally based as much on trying to crack each other up as on musical experimentation, there’s a risk of slipping into terrain that could be discarded as novelty or comedy. However, despite their proclivity for the playful and profane, they write sharp, infectious, unique music that just also happens to double up as being refreshingly fun.
Listen to their 2023 debut Crisps, and it’s immediately clear how much the pair are stretching out sonically on their follow-up. The opening “Poor Bannister” might be a spoken word song about a vomiting incident on public transport but its almost delicate delivery – over bluegrass-style looped fingerpicking – sets the tone for a record that is richly varied, stuffed with hooks and ceaselessly surprising. “The Definitive Map” sounds a bit like The Fall merged with Guided By Voices if they got into glam. The punchy and catchy “The Radiator” sounds like a mid-noughties dance-punk track DFA might have put out. “What’s On Your Mind” is the kind of dreamy lo-fi pop that Deerhunter were putting out at their peak, while tracks like “Probiotic” and “Lentils” showcase the pair’s ability to tap into pure classic rock riffage.
There’s still plenty of silliness here. “I expect you to die…Mr Ben” (on “Stop Living”) is a perfect example of their love of pop culture word association. “The Definitive Map” – a song about provincial life and the horrors of battery farms for chickens (“I’m playing potluck in pigsties with an overactive thyroid/Four times a week getting jumped on by a big lad”) – relies on a repeated shouting refrain of “you fucking bastard”, while the antidote to clean living, “Lentils”, includes lines about being more “full of shit than your average nappy”.
Elsewhere, there’s plenty of free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness wordplay, with lyrics that often feel like fragmented cut-ups, merging ad-libs, memories, stories, imagined conversations and wry observations. However, there’s some emotional weight and poignancy that runs through the record too, often reflecting on childhood (sometimes literally, sometimes as metaphor), nostalgia, anxieties and insecurities. The atmospheric and synth-washed “Cha Cha Slide”, sees Law return to being a lonely and unsure six-year-old at a party – perhaps via the lens of an unsure adult now – which he delivers with quiet depth. Similarly, there’s a juxtaposition contained within tracks like “Stop Living”, which fuses Prince-esque strutting grooves with pathos-ridden lyrics that ponder feelings of being trapped and uncertain in life.
The group has drawn comparisons to Sleaford Mods, but in reality they feel closer in spirit to a group like Arab Strap, albeit reflecting their own generation. Like the Scots, they are a band that can harness humour and poignancy in equal measure, and one who know their way around a meaty riff as neatly as they do a disco beat or melodic hook. It’s testament to the pair’s clear songwriting chops and production skills that they can glide so seamlessly from genre-to-genre, almost recalling a hip-hop mixtape, while still retaining a core, albeit idiosyncratic, identity.
The album’s closer, “600 Dance Lessons”, is perhaps the biggest left turn on the whole album: a two-minute spoken-word number featuring a wandering monologue about a dance class, over glossy yet deconstructed R&B beats, that ends with the narrator drifting off into a tangent about Game Of Thrones. And then it stops dead. A bit like someone walking out of the pub mid-way through listening to someone’s conversation. It’s a suitably bizarre but beguiling way to end an album that remains delightfully impossible to predict from beginning to end.
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