Benefits – Constant Noise Review

Reinvention is a bold tool available to anyone with the confidence and commitment to pursue it. Benefits has both, and with it comes a new sound, a fresh take on their anti-establishment bursts of opportune, culturally relevant and aware music. Constant Noise is not just a never-ending occurrence but a blast of sincerity at a time when the fight for some space in the spotlight, however brief, comes as a result of self-sacrifice. Third single Missiles, featured on this second album from Benefits, suggests it. A Christmastime release where the point is made clear. We cannot accept the suspension of global horror. On and on it goes, yet we are coddled and placated by this distraction or that social media post. Constant Noise cuts through those whines and crackles of static with a brutal assessment of the world. Benefits has pushed on from Nails not with a change in their fury but in how to articulate it.  

Adapt to the challenge. Few can do what Benefits does. There is no sense of comfort on this second release from the duo, and it could have been a time to kick up their feet as many other former protest or politically-charged bands are doing. Steady and spoken-word charms are found in this new angle from Kingsley Chapman, who remains one of the country’s finest, charged songwriters. Social and cultural cornerstones are touched on not for the bragging rights of knowing what it is, this is no walk through the joys of an art gallery but a warning of what these galleries and museums are set to become. The title track brings a brutal tone to it, an honest one. Middle-class drownings are on the rise, the gap getting wider and all those worries are not made by Chapman to stir hate, but to show us there is a route through. Getting there is the difficult part.  

Constant Noise remains at odds with what is popular not because it has a mistrust of the mainstream but because we should, rightly, question our nostalgia. Lead single Land of Tyrants hits out at this, as does The Victory Lap. What is there to be proud of in the United Kingdom from the time of your birth to now? Benefits has an eye on those who live on a love of patriotism, poppies and Peters’ World Cup winner’s medal. All of it feels very defiant, and rebellious in the Trainspotting generation style but with a modern bite. It is not just a heavy ladling of vocal defiance, of lyrical discontent, but of instrumental brilliance. No artist has a better read on the world than Benefits. That much is clear on Constant Noise. It is a rare feeling, to be shaken up and sincerely moved by music with such close, microscopic reads on the world, and yet Chapman makes it feel not like all hope is lost but that this is the start of something new. 

We are reaching a dead end and the powerful hunger heard in the outrageous instrumentals of Rage, a nice callback to Nails, proves it. Reaction begets action. Constant Noise knows it. You know it, too. An alert and startling album the whole way through, and a neat Pete Doherty collaboration in there too on Relentless. Club beats and brilliant whirrs of life beyond doubt and fear can be heard on Blame, it carries on to Divide, a rhythm which keeps up with the usual culture fallbacks, the pints and club scene smothering any shot of individualism in a country where its image is starting to blur into nothingness. Emotionally charged moments where Benefits, Chapman and Doherty too, understand the decadence and generational blame game at play in a country falling from grace, yet its people are in ignorance of this fact. 

There is a frustration heard throughout Constant Noise which will hit well with those socially aware listeners, those who can identify a problem and accept it while knowing what needs to come next. But it is not a smug realisation. It is a frustration, growing and bubbling as it does on the social media putdown on Terror Forever. Those moments of percussion find their way through rising jazz and improvisational tones, and it makes all the difference for the vocal performance. All we can do is identify the bootlickers, the sticklers and the shameful, as Constant Noise does. Frustrations are seen as weakness but they are anything but. They are outlines of care and for all the rightful bashing of the country heard through Constant Noise, there is an overarching love, a genuine desire for change and a kick against the petrol station to funeral parlour gentrification, heard within. Treat the world with kindness, as Dancing on the Tables does, but remember they will be tinged by nostalgia sooner than you think.