One of the tracks on Zen Baseballbat's latest album, released earlier this year, is called Destination Normal. I imagine the track carrying an invisible question mark: is the semi-legendary re-formed 'techno reggae and disgruntled rhyme' (to use their own words) band finally heading in the direction of normality after years in the awkward corner of the cult-band backwaters?
ZBB have now dropped the horns that adorned their earlier releases on the Moon Ska label but that doesn't mean they've gone back to their origins as beat-up rude boy/post-punk underclass visionaries. Watching them live (as you should when you get the chance), they're a solid outfit these days, dispatching tight, rhythmic gems that found their way into the recording studio and, inevitably, appear here.
The visionary tag is certainly still well-applied though: Angry Man is a fitting anthem for current times and it's perhaps a measure of how things have gone into an awkward full circle that it might just as easily hearken back to the midst of the punk/oi culture wars (although of course no one called them that back then). The title track brings irony off the bench before the colours are firmly nailed to the mast in The Curse of Capitalism before returning as a laid-back reprise in the album-closer Caught Stealing.
Destination normal? Nah, they come across as a band still soaked in influences of yore who've been liberated by their experiences to end up somewhere like that hinterland where it all started. If a wish of those afflicted by the curse of middle age is 'I wish I'd known then what I know now', There's Nothing Worth Stealing is the work of band who are able to take that knowledge, return to their former stamping ground and put it to good, if thankfully not conventional, use.
Get it here.
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