The Voltarol Years

CD (RMQUALTROUGHCD001)
– 25 February 2022

General album chat here

The Lyrics

Album Reviews

John Tansey, Temporary Fandoms on Facebook:

The band’s 15th album, ‘The Voltarol Years’ (I believe it’s known as Voltaron in the US by the way) is their first since 2018’s ‘No-one Cares About Your Creative Hub, So Get Your Fuckin’ Hedge Cut’. What has changed? Well, the label Probe Plus is sadly no more, so it is available on the band’s own R.M. Qualtrough label. If you know the band, you might well ask if that’s an obscure reference of some kind, and would you believe it – it is, and it’s very HMHB.

As with all their albums, there are lots of moments to treasure and the customary turns of phrase that could only ever come from one person. There’s the very relatable tale of reminiscing about a weird childhood friend nobody is in touch with anymore in ‘Awkward Sean’ – “Keith Muldoon said he was dead/Murdered by a giraffe/Christine Payne said: “No he’s alive, He lives in Haverfordwest”/Chemtrail Brian has him in York/Getting dragged out of the Ouse/AirWair boots, surgical gown/Counter-majority views…’ Characteristically, Sean’s strangeness is ultimately celebrated rather than mocked. I like to think Sean and Stringy Bob from ‘National Shite Day’ crossed paths at some point in the Biscuitverse.

There are the obligatory Hardy references in the bittersweet ‘Tess of the Dormobiles’. We are treated to vintage invective interwoven with a serial killer story in ‘In A Suffolk Ditch’. Elsewhere, ‘Midnight Mass Murder’ proposes the idea that people who turn up for midnight mass at Christmas are akin to glory hunting football fans (‘gormless bores in Superdry’) who only ever watch the team in a big cup game. It’s brilliant. ‘Grafting Haddock in the George’ is sure to be a live favourite and contains my favourite line on the album.

‘Slipping the Escort’ is a heartbreaker about losing a loved one to dementia – ‘The surgery leaflets/Offer advice/But there’s no preparation/For losing him twice’. The loved one does have a backstory as a football hooligan to temper the sentimentality though. Then the closer ‘Oblong of Dreams’ is a Neoromantic exploration of transcendence when experiencing the sublime in nature, obviously. It covers a lot of ground, this album.

Paddy Shennan:

Full 7500-word review has its own page here.

Press Quotes

“Nigel is genuinely one of the best songwriters that we have. His observations are always funny and tragic and true. They are genuinely still as good as they ever were. Every moment of triumph just lifts you that little bit higher because he’s building something. He’s built this body of work. There’s a poetic side to this because he really chooses every single word so carefully.” – Ian Harrison, Mojo, on The Culture Bunker podcast (44m 30s)
“Every four years a Half Man Half Biscuit album turns up and I’m just absolutely delighted. I’ve listened to a lot of Half Man Half Biscuit obviously, and I think this really is one of the best ones.” – Andrew Harrison on The Culture Bunker podcast (44m 20s)
“There are gags aplenty, and the laughs are reliably deadpan and mordant, but there are also intense moments of introspection; it’s quite bleak in places. Maybe that’s what the last couple of years have done for us all. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it; it wouldn’t be the first time, I suppose. No matter, the world is a better place for having more Half Man Half Biscuit in it, and that’s a fact. Right now, I’ll take that.” – Darren Stephens on Medium
“Overall… the Biscuits offer a smile, a song and an escape from the advancing years – as long as you don’t think about it too much.” – Stuart McHugh in The Star, Sheffield
“At a time when genuine working class voices are being more and more marginalised across the arts, you wonder how many more voices like Blackwell’s we are likely to hear in the future, or whether somebody of his ilk would be given the space and time to cultivate such a body of work.” – Ben Lowes-Smith in Tribune magazine