Blowing a raspberry at the critics is acceptable for rappers but not for cocksure rock stars, especially when the broadside is so completely unengaging. Already polarizing music critics by daring to be a British band that didn’t sound British, the ‘Phonics gave the pop intelligentsia unlimited cannon fodder for the foreseeable future with the tiresome put-down single “Mr. There are a lot of reasons why the Stereophonics have failed to deliver on the early promise of Word Gets Around and its super-solid follow-up Performance and Cocktails, but the complaints begin in 2001 with their third record, Just Enough Education to Perform. Kelly Jones wants to feel like he did before, but he’s like he never was. It was a nearly flawless debut that seemed direct, fresh and new next to the detached macrocosmic scope that pervaded the British rock of the period. His peat-and-smoke vocals were underscored by swelling, no-nonsense pub-rock, a combination that perfectly suited the portraits of village life he provided. Jones was no poet, but his tableaus had a realism that was grimly funny and just lightly tinged with an empathetic sadness that had something distinctly Welsh to it. The vibrant narratives of their debut Word Gets Around evoked a closed universe that I felt I knew as well as lead singer and lyricist Kelly Jones did: a tight-knit, conservative circle-jerk of gregarious shopkeepers, ambitious local movers, nosy neighborhood Himmlers and lovable inebriates, over which equal parts of perversion and tragedy hung like ominous thunderheads in the wide sky. Paul, Alberta, Canada and Cwmaman, South Wales than I had previously imagined. When I first discovered the Stereophonics in 1998, I realized there was much less distance between the small towns of St. “Wanna feel / Like I did before / Time changes me / I’m like I never was”
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