Album Review: New Model Army, "The Love of Hopeless Causes"

NMA defy categorization with relish. Their music fuses elements of rock with folk, whilst nodding frequently at their defiant indie roots. Today Justin Sullivan is no less angry.

The lyrics to Here Comes The War and Believe It throw his frustrations straight in your face. And if ever the disadvantaged lacked a rallying cry My People begs to be chosen.

Using a style that approaches narrative and almost never rhymes, Sullivan speaks to the listener with commanding intensity. Deceptively simple, at times unexpectedly beautiful, The Love Of Hopeless Causes strides purposefully along atop Robert Heaton's crisp, uncluttered drumming. Personally I find Causes so exciting because NMA steadfastly refuse to become musically overindulgent.

Lyn Guy
Riff Raff
June 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!