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Welfare State

from Play For Today by Ultrasound

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    Ultrasound
    Play For Today FIERCE PANDA
    Epic pop and prog from the reformed five-piece
    Thirteen years between first and second album is lax by anyone’s standards but then Newcastle-born Ultrasound have never been your typical band. An art-school outfit in the Roxy Music mode and with unashamed neo-prog proclivities, they signed to Suede’s label during the post-Britpop feeding frenzy, released a minor classic and then split under pressure in 1999. Thankfully Play For Today picks up where debut Everything Picture left off - with the thunderous baroque n’ roll anthem of opener Welfare State. Epic and heartfelt are Ultrasound’s strengths and few do it better, whether on the snarling, swinging post-glam of Goodbye Baby, Amen or the emotive use of a colliery brass band on Between Two Rivers. “I’ve only ever written music for the future,” singer Andrew ‘Tiny’ Wood said recently. Perhaps Ultrasound’s time has finally come.
    8/10
    Ben Myers

    Includes unlimited streaming of Play For Today via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.     ... more
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lyrics

We come in pieces of 5
Our press release says we’re jive
But we are the ones
The sons of Mums
Who worked their fingers in half
So everybody could starve to make this possible
‘Cos no-one ever cared about us

And this song is the clarion call
And if it means we have to reform
We crashed and burned but we returned
To claim our stakes

From the day that we’re born
To the day that we die
We are safe in the arms of the welfare state
And that’s great

So everybody
Sing for your life
‘Cos the surgical knife
Will cut you down to the size
Of a single high rise in the sky

We’ve been away for a while
But we were never in style
We are the ones etc

And we’re so sorry that we’re late
But we are for the welfare state
And the unemployment rate
Just grows and grows

From the day etc

So everybody etc

We’ve been so long in the tooth
But now we’re longing for you
We curse and swear ‘cos we’re free
Like millionaires on a spree
This is the home of the slave
Decrepit, dull and depraved
We smoke like fags in the bath
We’re only having a laugh
We stand in changing rooms
Now everything is possible and
All we really care for is love

We are the filthy flyblown fools
We are the haunted frightened ghouls
We have no homes we have no souls
We are the greasy unwashed scum
We are the paupers on the run
We’ve never done a day’s work in our lives
We sit and watch the world on Jeremy Kyle
We all just dream

Of the day etc

Now everybody etc

credits

from Play For Today, released May 1, 2020
Green/Wood

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Ultrasound London, UK

Ultrasound are an English indie rock band. With roots in the British underground psychedelic and experimental rock scenes of the 1980s and early 1990s, the band emerged in 1997 and soon gained attention for their "operatic prog-glam ambitions" and "violent reworking of the idiosyncratic compositions of Captain Beefheart and the staged ambisexual pop idioms of the likes of David Bowie ... more

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