Home-Made In Sunderland

AgitProp

AgitProp
Tracklist:
  1. Where The Truth Lies
  2. Capitalism Kills
  3. Surveillance
  4. Bad Dream
  5. Just Another Prick With A Gun
  6. Fluke
  7. Fuck Authority
  8. Not Enough
  9. Once More With Feeling
  10. Faith & Ignorance
  11. Hidden Movements
  12. Dealing With Pigs
Written between October 2004 and February 2005
All tracks written, produced, recorded, mixed and mastered by Neil O'Brien.
Cover art by Neil O'Brien.

At this point - five albums and scarcely more than 6 months into Rude Corps' existence - it was starting to look like my albums alternated between decent and shit releases. AgitProp, in my head, is certainly one of the better ones, feeling like a re-focus and technical leap forward, both in terms of style and production polish, and also in that this was the first record to feature my own vocals: four of the tracks finished up with lyrics, and if I remember rightly, another was meant to ("Just Another Prick With A Gun") but I wasn't happy with them so it was left as an instrumental. Thematically, it's obviously a political album, and listening back to it now, I'm struck by how at times it sort of evokes the "electronic punk" vibes of The Prodigy's Fat Of The Land. There's parts where it gets a bit industrial / EBM in a similar way to Life In The Shadows but more polished. Again, not all the tracks are great, but there's enough highlights to make it still worthwhile I think.

This album was re-mixed / re-visited at least once (in 2009) and possibly also in 2006, so again, I don't have the original files anymore, unless they're on some back-up CD I've got in a forgotten drawer. I know the original vocals were pretty bad: a combination of my awkward noobish delivery and the awful mic / soundcard I was working with. The 2009 version (which I'll be sharing) had the vocals re-recorded and they still hold up pretty well I think. Overall, I think this is a pretty strong album - definitely one of the top 5 Rude Corps records I reckon.