I spent a few days in Chichester once, and if I'd spent any longer then this record is what I'd have sounded like. If I'd had any musical talent. Which I haven't. There's a spirit of righteous anger burning in the veins of every track here, that's been missing from popular British music for a while now. While across the pond, musicians of many creeds and colours are Rocking Against Bush, over in blighty everyone's... everyone's what? Stoned out of their minds and swimming through the skies on a mushroom cloud? Possibly. The reclassification of marijuana in the immediate aftermath of September 11th might have been an even smarter move for Tony Blair than any of us realised at the time. So thank God then, for the pit that is Chichester, because shitty suburban social vacuums are the breeding grounds for so much of Britain's great Angry Music.

Pretty much everything here is concerned in some way with America, but this is no act of cheap political bandwagoneering. It's nothing less ambitious than a passionate, intelligent, erudite examination of great societies bruised and dishonoured, and of ideals set adrift. String-drenched instrumental "The Black Amnesias" starts the album in an epic mode that most albums' closing tracks would struggle to achieve, "66 Sleepers To Summer"s motorik beat rumbles away with a hint of Radiohead to it, before Simon Jones' martial drumming marches it into a world that is definitively Hope Of The States' own. That crashing piano descend in "The Red The White The Black The Blue" is a heart-stopper every time, and the glorious "Black Dollar Bills" is like an entire Mercury Rev album concentrated into one magnificent shining nugget.

However, for all its complexity and literacy, what makes this album a success is the honesty and simplicity of its delivery. Where a group like Muse rage behind an icy, theatrical veneer, Hope Of The States have a refreshing emotional directness, and a willingness to allow a great deal of warmth to share space with the darker moments on the album, a feat perhaps best achieved on the spine-tingling, waltz-time "Sadness On My Back". Probably the best thing about them though, is that they show every sign of just getting better and better. Bad news for Bush, good news for the rest of us. -Ian Martin, July.10.04

The Lost Riots