The band hit their peak in 1992- going to # 1 on the UK Album charts and their biggest success in the US with 1992:The Love Album.
Though the music of that time has faded largely from memory, 1992: The Love Album is an all time favorite of mine. Critics will occasionally bring up the band that form forgot. Carter threw puns about while making wry observations about the mundane day to day or sneaking in social criticism into catchy pop songs. The band had Ian Dury show up for a cameo, and though it may have seemed an unusual pairing at the time, there was definitely a linear path from Dury to Carter’s lyricist “Jim Bob”.
Although it felt trendy at the time, the music from the era didn’t age well. Now if doesn’t help to name your band “the Unstoppable Sex Machine” or have unconventional hairstyles or have the guitarist name himself Fruitbat.
But none of these bands get much praise anymore. In the US, the most successful band in this genre and time was Jesus Jones. Even with their massive success, you never hear anything about them.
I often hear among those friends around 50 years of age who much they loved Ned’s Atomic Dustbin but between Britpop and Grunge, it seems like this music was just a short lived fad.
Jim Bob didn’t stop when Carter broke up in 1998. He wrote an autobiography and then became a novelist. From 2003 to 2016, he released 7 albums. But it was 2020s Pop Up that brought him back to attention, breaking back onto the UK Album charts.
It was also the first time I had heard his solo music (and indeed, the first I had given him some thought in some time).
That album Pop Up, 2021s Who Do We Hate Today and 2023s Thanks for Reaching Out were revelations. Each record took personal narratives to make comment on the current world- whether it be toxic masculinity, cancel culture, gun violence or any number of other topics.
For my money, I am not sure there’s a better songwriter with that much quality output in that time frame.
My expectation would have been that after being so prolific, the quality would go down or the artist burn himself out. So I was shocked when JimBob approached 2025 by releasing two albums on the same day. More shocking is that they seem to be both quality.
Today, I am going to focus on Automatic. The other album Stick is a noisier affair that recalls the Carter USM days, but Automatic is very much in the vein of the three previous albums and is recorded with the same backing band.
On lead single “Danny From Nowhere”, he sings “I have broken a promise that I made to myself I’d never write another one of these songs”
But he has and he has done another album of them. Whether the lyric is true or artistic license Automatic follows the template and showcases his narratives of common people and their hobbies and worries whether it be drones, knitting or mortgage. There are everyday villains and everyday heroes. There are also killer one liners like “wars don’t end/just like Boy Bands they just go on hiatus”.
As good as his recent run is, the album unexpectedly may be the best one of his solo run yet. “Danny” is the single and it’s fantastic but my favorite song on the album is “Can you hear us at the back of the room”. At its heart, a riposte to people who complain about new music being derivative, but is a celebration of a lot of bands that influenced Jim.
There’s still no one quite like Jim Bob. Half Man Half Biscuit come to mind but they seem to come at things slightly different. There’s a bit of “how the hell do I categorize this” in that way you might say the same thing about The Divine Comedy or The Wedding Present or Gorkys Zygotic Mynci.
While Jim Bob says Automatic was originally planned as B-sides for his other album (an idea he quickly gave up deciding on two records) it is really one of my favorite records of the year and proof that Jim Bob is one of the planet’s underappreciated artistic geniuses.
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