Consumer Guide Album

The Housemartins: London 0, Hull 4 [Elektra, 1986]
Fashion leaders in their cardigans and baggy pants, these unpretentious soul-boys-in-a-pop-band are so perky you think they're about to break into a cereal commercial, but in fact they have a different product in mind: socialist revolution. I'd leave it at something vaguer (Marxist Christianity, say) if their disdain for fence-sitters and other sheep wasn't so fervent, so bitter, and--rarest of all--so just. And if their catchiest hook didn't go (hum along, now) "Don't shoot someone tomorrow/ That you can shoot today." Very nice. A-