Menace To Sobriety (2000) - OPM

It's time for another review, but before I can proceed, there is first some important backstory that needs addressing. Think of it of an origin story for how I got to the point where I'm reviewing albums, for primarily personal benefit, in 2021, on a blog called The Sound System.

Let me set the scene: It's the year 2002 and you're a late-to-the-party boy of 11 who has just been gifted a personal CD player for his birthday. As someone who has yet to develop any kind of individual taste in music, you requested with it the things that everyone at school was listening to - S Club 7's Sunshine and the latest instalment in the 'Now' series, Now That's What I Call Music! 50. Still getting used to the audio format, more fascinated with the novelty of not needing to rewind anything than actually listening, you witlessly play Don't Stop Movin' on repeat, and the few singles from the compilation album whose titles you recognise. Naturally, Now 50 is a trendy conversation subject at school, and your friend Alistair, who you respect because he's popular but not cool (at least not too cool to talk to you), passingly mentions that track 12 is decent. Because your personality is underdeveloped and you apparently hang off the every word of anyone nice enough to humour you with their opinions, you run home after school and skip to OPM's Heaven Is A Halfpipe. And then, for perhaps for the first time in your life, you actually properly listen to a song, absorbing the sound of a skateboard panning from left to right in time with a tack piano sample and super-chilled guitar lick alternating between two simple chords. You listen to the layers pile on and peel off and, before you know it, you've autonomously decided, with no outside input, that this music is fucking cool. And this marks the first step of your musical journey, and developing a musical mind of your own.

As someone whose prior exposure to music is so negligible, you really know very little about how things are done in the music industry. But you sure are a tactile kid who loves to pull out the sleeves of your only two albums and pore over the pictures and liner notes! So it doesn't take long to notice the recurring phrase "taken from the album '______'" and see that, sure enough, a whole album of OPM songs exists, and it's called Menace To Sobriety. You're 11, you don't understand the punny title or know what sobriety is. You ask your dad to look for it next time he goes to the shops on his lunch hour, as he works in a nearby city with an HMV (you've already scoured Woolworths to no avail). Maybe the red flag was in the title. Maybe it was in the cover art. Or maybe it was in that little black and white sticker that your poor protective father decided to take so seriously. He's a very honest kind of guy, so where other fathers might tell their child that the record store simply doesn't have it stocked, or that it's too expensive, he does this: he buys the CD, listens to it through (he even checks out the bonus CD-Rom, removable only by lifting the jewel case insert to reveal a close crop of someone's rather ample cleavage) and tells you that, in his responsibility as a parent, he cannot let you have this album.

Never had it occurred to me that the scratches in the chorus of Heaven Is A Halfpipe were any more than a series of stylistic embellishments, or that a quarter of the middle 8 had been cut out of the compilation's version because it referenced drugs. I don't remember what happened next. All I know is that, for whatever reason, it didn't long for him to concede, and I don't believe I underwent any dirty tactics to get him to hand it over. Apparently my acceptance of his initial decision demonstrated enough maturity to change his mind. Straining to remember, I'm pretty sure I was forbidden from using the CD-Rom (which was of zero interest to me anyway, particularly when he told me that the music videos were full of people throwing up in toilets), and I swear he told me that I just 'wasn't allowed to listen to it much' - which is a weak bargain that can't possibly be enforced, but one that I took seriously given the trust he was placing in me.

As it goes, only the most blatant profanities showed up on my radar - the majority of the 'explicit content' went right over my head. For example, for several years, I genuinely thought Dealerman was about counterfeiting clothes, because I took the opening lines literally and didn't pay attention to the rest. Lyrical content doesn't tend to grab me in the way all the other musical elements do (this will come to be a recurring factor in my reviews), so unless there's a really succinct thematic connection with the music itself, I zone out of what is being said, and instead focus on how it's being delivered. And it just so happens that the most debauch songs that my father was hoping to shield me from were the ones that appealed less to me musically. Whether one factor informed the other on a subliminal level is impossible to say, but here I am, 20 years on, with no gang or drug habit, and a song ranking that very closely resembles the order I'd have picked as a kid:

1. Heaven Is A Halfpipe
2. Fish Out Of Water
3. Brighter Side
4. Sound System
5. Unda
6. El Capitan
7. Reality Check
8. Better Daze
   
9. Undercover Freak
10. Stash Up
11. Dealerman
12. Trucha
    (Exempt from total score: Interludes Punanny, Rage Against The Coke Machine & 15 Minutes, hidden track The War On Drugs)

Total Points: 38/60
Average Score: 6.33

Menace To Sobriety is full of simple chord sequences that teeter back and forth, thumping breakbeats and turn-of-the-Millennium record scratches. There's great variety in guitars; everything from rich, steely strumming, to ska-style, upbeat stabs, to fills of fuzzy, skate-punk-esque noise. This palette of textures is used to great effect, upping the ante step-by-step as Better Daze reaches its climax, or adding fantastic conviction to the bridge of Fish Out Of Water, the album's other main standout after Heaven Is A Halfpipe. Crisp, sincere harmonies of 'ahhs' compliment the franker tone of Brighter Side's chorus, while the optimism expressed in underdog anthem Unda is matched with upbeat guitar accents and a spirited saxophone (of all instruments!) solo. As I've mentioned before, I love when music does exactly what it says, when the lyrics match the sound, and nothing exemplifies this synergy more than Sound System (which has been popping into my head ever since I named this blog). This reggae-infused track really is the party atmosphere its lyrics are describing, that is begging to be blasted on a 'sound system in my backyard' with the intention to 'wake up the town'.

The album's greatest asset is that its music is never compromised, even when the themes aren't there to be taken seriously. Even something as tongue-in-cheek as an ode to Captain Morgan's Rum is set to a kicking backing track, making sure that less solemn topics are never pushed into straight up joke territory. The weakest points come in the form of interludes (sidenote: thanks to OPM I've added the word 'coke' to the band Rage Against The Machine in conversation more times than I've said it correctly) and the acoustic hidden track, which (on my copy at least) is inexplicably censored after an album full of impropriety. Thankfully, these don't impact the score, but the somewhat droning chorus of Trucha isn't to my taste, and comes across kind of damp compared to the rest of the record.

Menace To Sobriety does not have critical acclaim or, from what I can tell, much of a retrospective cult following. Perceived as a something of a one-hit wonder, OPM never went on to hold the attention of the worldwide musical spotlight their debut single granted them. Why this is, I cannot say - I'm not savvy to the contextual factors, such as marketing, band history or record labels. But as far as the content of this album goes, there is sufficient substance and well-engineered balance to show that they had their collective finger on the pulse. Its full of self-awareness, wit, charisma and an outlook that dryly bridges the gap between darkness and joy. It's such a straightforward effort that it barely warrants an analytical review like this - it defeats the point. It's not music made for evaluating, it is music made for enjoying and extracting the essence out of life's ups and downs. I wanted to write about it because it's clear today that it had quite an impact on my formative years, but the high regard in which I hold it isn't just born out of nostalgia, but out of genuine appreciation for its quality. If nothing else, I've done my bit on shining a light on an album you might never have considered may exist.