Album Review: MC16 - Machine Code
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Our good friends, punk band MC16, are set to release their debut full-length album, Machine Code, and I have been in the privileged position of hearing new tracks as the band record them over the past eighteen months, or so.
Previous multi-track release, the seven-song …No Blood No Guilt was issued back in the summer of 2022 and showed a band imbued with a righteous anger about the state of this once-great nation. From the architectural vandalism of towns, up and down the country, to the appalling treatment of our service personal after leaving the forces, …No Blood was a gloves-off assault on the unfettered decline of everything for which our grandparents sacrificed.
Neither the intervening years, nor the change of government, has blunted MC16’s ire, and the four tracks to which I have been privy showed the band’s musical and lyrical disdain for war, waged for the sake of profit (Shoot ‘Em Up), the political establishment (One From Another), the Further Education system (Polytechnic), the dangers posed to us by the unceasing move to digitalisation (Data Donors).
Any risk that MC16 have conformed and mellowed for this album outing is quickly dispelled by the first ‘new’ tune, Ground Control, opening with a doomy bassline from Quinn, which ends with a distinctive growl before Carson arrives, through a low and dirty guitar and his usual barbed vocal delivery.
As all good punks should do, MC16 see the inadequacies of the modern world through the failure of its institutions and the hole at the heart of the brave new world. Here, the utopia of the internet’s unfettered access to the vast knowledge of the age, is corrupted to the whims of influencers with more clout than the media. It’s possibly the band’s most mainstream musical moment, but not without their trademark trenchant social commentary.
As a balance to Ground Control’s theme, OHlternative’s Seventies-rooted punk rock stomp looks to the google box in the corner of the room and its hypnotising and pacifying effect; evoking the ideas of Adorno and Horkhiemer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, yet equally as approachable in a musical sense, this wears its rebellious attitude proudly.
It’s not all about the punk rock, as Can’t Get No Fun arrives early with Quinn and drummer, Duffy, crafting a laid-back reggae beat as Carson’s staccato licks pulse with his spoken word observations; and Tourist blends those reggae rhythms with some fat bottom-ended guitar.
Machine Code’s coda sees its sights aimed squarely at the plight of the workers; Bricks & Martyrs uses the juxtaposition of a big foundation and lighter guitar to address the ephemeral nature of industrial communities, many of which are heavily medicated due to their situation. Workers 40 commemorates the anniversary of the Miner’s Strike, a subject that has been tackled by other punk bands, such as The Clash and New Model Army, but which still - four decades on – provokes righteous anger from those who witnessed it first-hand.
That ire is replicated in the heavy delivery and the call to all the collieries and their communities so deeply affected by the action. Each call-out gets the response of “Up the workers” and the defiance of the line “Got no hand, just a middle finger.” MC16 make no bones about their politics and are ready to man whatever barricade stand between them and the forces of oppression; to make truth from Shelley’s declaration: “We are many, they are few.”
At just twenty-five minutes in length Machine Code is both a swift kick up the backside to the apathetic and a rollicking good punk record. Make of it what you will, but scratching the surface, even a little, will reveal the warnings of a slave new world.
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