Indelicates: American Demo: Reverse Baldness, Change Your Life

I hesitate to review a CD. Like every other half-educated man of my age, I spent the early to mid 70s in thrall to the NME, believing that I too could write like Nick Kent or Charles Shaar Murray. Too many of us have fastened on the blog as a way to revive these ambitions in the evening of our lives. But I must say something about the brilliance of the Indelicates' American Demo. Milton is not often referred to in modern music; French symbolists are so much more en vogue. But American Demo proudly bears an epigraph from Satan's speech to the fallen angels:
'....Peace is despaired
For who can think submission? War then, war
Open or understood, must be resolved'
Paradise Lost Book 1 660-662

Epic is not a form often attempted by modern musicians, but the Indelicates' choice of Milton is significant. Martial, too, is present, in mordant satirical songs. I know many of these from the earlier downloadable versions and it is thrilling to hear them now in new, more polished arrangements; then there are also new pleasures: Unity Mitford, If Jeff Buckley had Lived, Heroin, America....
I wish I had seen them perform.

A footnote: a search for the passage from Paradise Lost found it on Google Books in a digitised volume Poetry from 1660 to 1780: Civil War, Restoration, Revolution, along with the sensitive and appropriate advertisement: Hair Restoration: Reverse Baldness. Change Your Life. Request a Free Quotation.