Dexters: We Paid For Blood

East London mod-rockers’ attitude-heavy second album.

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This Cockney five-piece have a lot going for them – not least some tall tales to tell. The pithy pen-pic of kinky goings on in Suburban Sex Dungeon and the macabre, Blur-ish domestic noir of Your Lovely Wife (telling the story of a battered spouse poisoning her abuser) immediately stand out on Dexters’ second album due to a neat way with a rhyming couplet.

When coupled with high-octane tunes like recent single Stay Strange, it’s a winning blend. You sense they just need a couple more such bangers to really stand out.

The upbeat Cast-style anthemics of You Deserve The World, for instance make a positive change from the standard work-is-drudgery, suburbia-is-hell sentiments found elsewhere, but the melody’s not quite memorable enough to help the words stick in the memory.

They’re evidently not lacking in wordsmith wit – all they need now is the musical wiles to capitalise on it more effectively.

Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock