“Thee Faction provide the perfect antidote to the smug gentrification of politics and music,” writes Karl Marx biographer Francis Wheen, and as ever, he’s not wrong.
The pseudonymous collective purvey piledriving, brassy R&B and proletarian-rousing politics, and deliver both with unapologetic gusto, at a time when both are needed more than ever. Specific problems are skewered, specific remedies offered on Better Than Wages and Employment, in which workers are invited to fight back against the erosion of leisure time and the owners of the means of production.
Scared Of Us observes that the masses are never stronger when pitted against the one per cent by whom they are downtrodden. Thee Faction are perfectly, ironically aware that the ideas in which they are dealing are supposed to belong to a previous era but they’re having none of such fatalism.
They make a mockery of pop’s enfeebled “post-political age”, offer a blood transfusion to the world-weary, painfully over-sophisticated state of 21st century pop. Get Your Hands Untied!, they cry. They’ve done their bit. The rest is up to us.
