The Human Project - 'Clarion Call' Album Review

Tracklist:

1. Desperate Times

2. Desperate Measures

3. That One Percent

4. The Rhetoric

5. Knocked For Six

6. Carrion

7. What We Always Do

8. Blame

9. Pride Before A Fall

10. A Debt To Society

11. Clarion Call

Every once in a while you get an album for review and it blows your brains out on your first listen, well shout it loud people, the new LP from The Human Project is one of those albums. It is the long awaited follow up to their incredibly accomplished debut album ‘Origins’ from 2013. If you like Metal, Punk, Thrash, Hard-Core or just good old Rock music then you will absolutely adore this collection. The Human Project are possibly one of the finest bands to come out of Leeds in recent years. At times the joint guitar attack of Jonny Smith and Luke Yates is faster and more powerful than a Peter Lorimer free kick. Yes that is a Leeds United reference from the days when they were dirty but good.

They wear their passionate views and politics on their sleeves and deliver messages against our rulers with emotion, soul and pure guts. I think it is obvious that they are dead against cuts to public services and the tragic farce that is Brexit. Those are just two more reasons to love them. They also rail against the abuse of democracy in the call to arms that is “A Debt To Society”. Not many Modern Punk type rockers can produce the kind of melodies that the Human Project do. Those mountainous melodies are overlaid with harmonies that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hard Rock Beach Boys. From the aforementioned Jonny Smith and Luke Yates on guitars and vocals through to the iron clad rhythm section made up of Joe Dimuantes on bass and Dan Powell this band are flawless.

The production from Andy Hawkins I believe adds even more power to the might of these stunning sonic messiahs! “Desperate Times” opens the album and draws you softly into what you imagine might at first be a slow building Prog Rock classic, then after around two minutes a nuclear level Punk aural onslaught smashes into your head and lines you up for the rest of the album to roll over you like a Tank Regiment.

There are not enough protest songs today, but The Human Project provide far more than their fair share. The attack on the UK’s weak Conservative government has never been as finely and eloquently portrayed as it is in “That One Percent”. This is essential listening in advance of the next election.

Listening to the album on my own had me leaping around the room pumping my fists in the air with total abandon. I have to see this band live now. The definition of a Clarion Call is ‘a strongly expressed demand or request for action’; well this album is taking no prisoners, it isn’t requesting action, it demands it!