This is Madness’ fourth studio album, and represents a shift in their style away from the more “nutty boys” ska sound of One Step Beyond and the like. Here, they’re moving towards an eclectic sound that’s still recognisably Madness, but brings in elements such as, for example, a brass band on the track Primrose Hill.
Although the track Blue Skinned Beast is an anti-Thatcher polemic, most of the songs are wistful reflections on yesteryear and, if the album evokes a sense of The Kinks that’s perhaps on purpose. The one major single from the album, Our House, exemplifies this; a nostalgic look at chaotic domestic life that although it paints a picture seemingly a far cry from the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song of the same name, at heart is still all about the comfort of the family home where "there's always something going on and it's often quite loud". Mr Speaker, meanwhile, has a Sergeant Pepper style of vaudeville to it. One can also look forward to Blur for more of the same kind of English whimsy.
A lot of the tracks, however, are more avant-garde and fractured. That Face, for example, with its “reflections of yesterday” is a particularly good example of this kind of sound. Madness (Is All In The Mind) has a kind of jazz club feel, and while the melody sounds like Fever by Peggy Lee, the chorus is up-tempo and sounds more like a do-wop track. These tracks bely what I said earlier, and really don’t sound like what you (or least I) might think of as a typical Madness track. It’s another of those albums where Dimery (and his editors) have chosen an album by an artist that is the one that really doesn’t sound much like their more typical work. Which is fine, but I sometimes think it’s worth including the baseline as well (I'd suggest Absolutely Madness for that).
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