Letters From The Underground - The Levellers

Letters from the Underground is Levellers' 11th album in a career spanning two decades in which the Brighton-based band has always walked their own path and never pandered to the mainstream or the highly-critical music press. Anyone who thought the Levs had lost some of their ability to write riproaring danceable tunes will be totally wrong-footed by this album which starts with the fiddle-heavy Cholera Well and just doesn't let up until the end, save for Behold a Pale Rider, a beautiful lament about the 7/7 bombings. The lyrics are back to their fiercely political best and each one of these tunes is uniformly excellent, knocking the likes of the current top 40 into a ...  Read the complete review

I have been a fan of The Levellers since I can remember, and awaiting their new album, Letters From The Underground, I was slightly worried. Probably the best album they have released is Levelling the Land, and album I have used many a time to convert the non Leveller to a full on Leveller - I think my tally is to about 20 people so far so I rate that as a fairly good conversion. Like I was saying, I was quite worried awaiting the release of this new album, as I was not too impressed with their last album release, Truth and Lies. Although I thought it was OK, I saw it more as a sign that the band were possibly starting to run out of ...  Read the complete review

This album, the Levellers, the bands ninth studio release, and comes twenty years into their distinguished career. Ever since the somewhat failed experiment of Hello Pig in 2000 the Levs have struggled to recapture the form and fire that made them such essential listening throughout the nineties. Although on "Green Blade Rising" and "Truth And Lies" there were some definite highlights, a combination of strange production choices, and some overtly cheesy songwriting seemed to hold them back. No such issues on this album. This is passionate and angry, it's folky and punky in equal measures, and it's the Levellers at their very best. Storming ...  Read the complete review