Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The trouble is with Governments is that they never learn, that they always find a way to delve just that little deeper into the widening foundry of desperation and push more people in, to make the general population just that little more compliant by suggesting the two words that nobody ever picks upon, “You next”.
The greed of it all, the anti-social behaviour of those elected and entrusted to look after the very people they are truly meant to serve is not lost and perhaps not since the early 1980s has Time shown this to be true, that the anger is building, the energy is fast becoming combustible. Yet without it, without this sneak preview of a dystopian fear chipping away at the back of the minds, the prospect of having truly memorable music coursing through the veins, music that isn’t shrink wrapped, packaged like some obscene toy made by children’s hands for the equivalent of 10 cents an hour, music that pulls together the anger and asks the listener to believe; that the Ferocious Dog still has bite in its every sinew and fibre.
Ferocious Dog’s second album, the superb From Without, is packed to the rafters with the shouts of the dispossessed, the forgotten and the unspoken and willingly wants to grab the policies of the day by the scruff of their necks and demand a different direction. It knows that the fight against the not so subtle feeling of disinfecting those to whom are seen as being a social underclass, that the words on the walls of the inner cities and the neighbourhoods may as well read scum, for this is what is being implied by those representing us on the world stage think.
The passion that comes throughout the whole of From Without is explosive, it is as raw as it is natural, it is the sound of revolution that beats in the heart of anyone who seeks equality and the six piece band from Nottinghamshire burst with flavour and ferocity. Yet, underneath it all, songs such as Gallows Justice, the sadly prophetic Living On Thin Air, Crime and Punishment and the heartbreak allusion in Slow Motion Suicide all hold out a hand of friendship, the type that you never knew you had batting in your corner for you and it this beauty that really underpins the album.
An album that fights with honour, that isn’t afraid to pull out the stops in its determination to ask difficult questions, From Without but certainly with noble intentions, this is the result of seeing the those made vulnerable by a system of disgust brought sharply to their knees; a tense and wonderfully courageous album, one to whom should be rallied behind immediately.
Ian D. Hall