This is one of those bands I love and yet forget just how much I love them until I pull out one of their CDs. New Model Army has been making ridiculously good and consistent music for a long, long time, since 1980 to be exact. They are led by lead singer, guitarist and main composer Justin Sullivan. He happens to be the only consistent member of the band during its existence.
If I remember correctly the first time I heard NMA was when my friend Josh Lucci lent me a copy of The Ghost of Cain my senior year in high school. To this day that is my favorite album from the band but I’ll be honest, it was not until the 1987 White Coats EP that I fully realized their amazingness. That song is beautiful and possesses one of the slickest bass lines I have ever heard in a song. Great vocals and lyrics from Justin Sullivan complete things, creating one of my all-time favorite tracks. The video is phenomenal too!
Before writing this post I listened to the 2005 reissue of Thunder and Consolation which originally came out in 1989. While New Model Army never hit it big in the US this album, their fourth studio one, is the record that did receive some decent airplay here and reached #20 in the U.K. I think it was the old AM station KUKQ that used to play “I Love the World” a lot, my favorite song from the album. NMA infused a bit more folk in this album without losing any of the aggression. It makes sense this was the disc that was released after the White Coats EP because as a fan I could track the progression from one record to the next.
Here is what blows me away. They have been around for 38 years now and since 1984 have released a total of 14 albums with the latest being 2016’s Winter. That last album was the #1 album of the year in The Big Takeover, a fanzine I personally feel is the best around in terms of legitimate music journalism. Pretty stellar. Let’s go to the wayback machine though and watch “White Coats” right now. Cheers!
The Musings of Frank Gallardo 