On Fatal Mistakes, Del Amitri return to the vicious, beery rock music of yesteryear

Sooner or later, by the imperatives of economics, nostalgia and unfinished business, it seems that every band with at least two members still standing will get back together. This week, it’s the turn of Scottish rockers Del Amitri, with their seventh album and their first in 18 years, ominously titled Fatal Mistakes.

It opens with a gesture of defiance, a paean to reunited love titled ‘You Can’t Go Back’. If that sounds like a gauntlet being thrown down, they double up on the swaggering ‘All Hail Blind Love’, a sarcastic anthem of co-dependency that uses the theme of romantic illusions to address the relationship between this particularly belligerent band and its audience: “Don’t think we’ve mellowed / We still think of one another as a fraud / Such strange bedfellows / It’s the hatred and resentment you applaud.”

There was always something a bit gnarly about Del Amitri, even in their youthful heyday. Their biggest hit came in 1989 with a mordant ballad of perpetual boredom, ‘Nothing Ever Happens’; their last one was a fatalistic football anthem for the Scottish team at the 1998 World Cup, bearing the anti-triumphalist title ‘Don’t Come Home Too Soon’. They match cynical lyrics with singalong melodies, delivered in the dour tone of old gits nursing whisky at Hogmanay, determined not to have a good time. Musically, they’re rooted in a Beatles-meets-Americana pop-rock style that has a strong lineage north of the border, beginning with Orange Juice and Aztec Camera, and continuing recently with excellent albums from Texas and Teenage Fanclub.

Del Amitri flourished during the Britpop years, but eventually faded. Dropped by their label, they broke up in 2002 because it was too economically challenging to carry on. Justin Currie, their bassist, vocalist and chief songwriter, kept making fine singer-songwriter albums but made little impact, before he belatedly got the band back together with guitarist Iain Harvie. Currie clearly has a lot to get off his chest: Fatal Mistakes is a fiercely provocative work, its 13 tightly-honed gems of poisonous misanthropy leavened by underlying compassion.

Currie has always been a sharp and cutting lyricist, and he’s on particularly savage form here, reigning extravagant curses (“God doesn’t love you”) on anyone who doesn’t appreciate the gigging life on the caustic ‘Musicians and Beer’. You’ll find bitter love songs (‘Otherwise’, ‘Losing the Will to Die’, the gorgeous ‘Second Staircase’), heartsore drinking songs (‘Missing Person’), and a satirical anthem so close to the bone you can imagine Brexiteers singing along while wondering if they’re being mocked (‘Close Your Eyes and Think of England’).

It all comes to a brutal conclusion with the apocalyptic rocker ‘Nation of Caners’, which starts like a beery knees-up but turns into a vicious seven-minute condemnation of mankind’s destruction of the planet, with Currie provocatively demanding: “Who can blame us?” Del Amitri’s bracing feel-bad pop-rock won’t be for everyone, but for those of us who appreciate sweet melodies set off with sour sentiments, it is perversely good to have the old curmudgeons back.

Out on Cooking Vinyl now