Combat Rock

comes with a cool poster, great album

On a recent interview CD,which came from a local record store grab bag no less,members of The Clash described this as their last album with a united front,both musically and personally.Well that may be true,in a sense. I will say that most of the drive and spirt in the band came from Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. And both left the band.....well after a whole fiasco involving drummer Topper Headon,resulting in a feud.Well that's too bad because topper really put out here with "Rock The Casbah".It's a masterjam of the punk-funk movement (sorry Rick James).And it's got a message too but hey THIS IS THE "ONLY BAND THAT MATTERS" RIGHT?Well forget what the press said about them:the quartet are still on a mission here and the music is evolving yet again. You have The Clash kind of treading new musical waters here:where there are some pretty standard fare dubby punk kind of tunes here such as "Know Your Rights","Car Jammming" and "Ghetto Defendant" (with Allen Ginsburg no less) there is also an attempt outside "Casbah" to do something poppier with "Should I Stay Or Should I Go",the other big US hit here anyway. Nevertheless there are some places here that,even for Clash fans accustomed to some of the warped grooves of  Sandinista!  seem to come a bit out of left field."Overpowered By Funk" is....well one of my favorites on the album definately goes by it's name as a heavy,percussive 80's "naked" funk groove. Other tunes such as "Red Angel Dragnet","Straight To Hell" again do a pretty good job at the whole mutant groove thing.Of course there are some plain sharper attacks such as "Atom Tan" and the more ambient dub of "Inoculated City" has some great use of sound samples:it has been said that the great "2000 flushes" ad featured has been deleted from later pressings of this CD but mine has it so I am not worried lol.One track that really impressess me here is a tune called "Sean Flynn";with it's dissonant jazzy sound and likeminded sax solo it's definately about where I personally live musically!This whole thing ends with...a slower but similar tune really in "Death Is A Star".So,if you like a lot diverse,mutated punk-funk grooves with heavily leftisty political lyrics this will be just up your alley.For those punk fans who hate this album...here's another way to look at it as The Clash themselves admitted it:their concept of bringing their message to everyone would be felt just as well with the pop and abstract musical concepts dealt with on this album as with hard core punk rock because if their music felt like nothing but a huge attack,it would've never gained more then a cult following.They wanted to get as many peoples attention so they didn't change their message,just made music that could reach out to people who might not typically go for a Clash album.And from the look of how time has treated this album that was a pretty good choice.

This record is an eclectic gem. The songs represent an excellent distillation of their creative experiments on Sandinista!, The Radio Clash EP and Black Market Clash. It doesn't have that much in common with London Calling, though traces of the anthemic style of that record are present.Now I know a lot of reviews on this site dismiss 'Rock the Casbah' and 'Should I Stay or Should I Go' as commercial sell-out tracks, but they are great songs that still sound fresh today. It's not The Clash's fault if the songs became hits. In fact, any true fan of The Clash should be happy for them for the commercial success they enjoyed with this record. Combat Rock opened them up to thousands if not millions of new fans who purchased the older records and made The Clash one of the most successful and memorable bands in western music history. Good music should be rewarded. A vow of poverty is not required for greatness.Now for the songs:The great: Rock The Casbah, Should I Stay or Should I Go, Straight to Hell, Overpowered by Funk, Car Jamming, Inoculated City, Sean Flynn.The good to great: Red Angel Dragnet, Atom Tan, Know Your Rights, Ghetto Defendant, Death is a Star.The songs vary from funk, world beat, punk, reggae to rock, sometimes artfully combining all these styles in the same track. The excellent lyrics of Joe Strummer are as strong as ever, with Straight to Hell being a standout (among others). The creativity, versatility, writing and riff making abilities of Mick Jones continue to give The Clash that certain edge over the competition. Topper Headon was probably one of the best rock drummers ever. The man could do almost anything, and even wrote the music for Casbah. Paul Simonon continues to deliver interesting bass lines which add an extra dimension to the songs (Rock the Casbah, Overpowered by Funk are good examples). Finally, beginning with their ample use of horns on London Calling, The Clash were never afraid to use additional musicians to fill out the sound, and songs like Sean Flynn and Overpowered by Funk present continuing examples of The Clash's search for perfection. In short, this record is a great one and you should not miss out on it.

If you like the hits "Rock The Casbah" and "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" (and by the way, they ARE well worth the price of admission).If you don't mind that most of the other tracks don't sound much like those two hits.If you don't mind odd song structure.If some spoken lines, rather than melodic singing, doesn't bother you.If you read the lyrics, because many of the tracks seem meaningless unless you follow the lyrics.If you print the lyrics on paper, because the ones provided with the CD are practically unreadable without the Hubble telescope.If you are OK with social and political comment.If you don't fit those qualifications, there is a good chance that you will not like this album. When I played it for the first time, I didn't bother with lyrics, and afterwards I was sitting there saying "Wha???" But for the second play, I followed the lyrics, and I had an entirely different attitude. For some reason, a light came on! The band's music, which at first seemed dull, came to life for me. I didn't totally love it, but I found it interesting enough to explore, since I really like most 80's music, particularly New Wave. The social/political aspect, expressed in an undisciplined, free-form way, is important to making sense of this album. The Clash was spawned by the punk movement which originated in England as a reaction to severe economic depression and social turmoil in the mid-70's. This is their response, or reaction, to the issues of the times in which they were living.

For a punk band the Clash had some odd ways about them. Kicking off with perhaps the best punk debut album [sorry Rotten, Cook, Jones & Matlock, in my book if you only make one album and then implode, even if it is superb, it doesn’t really count as your debut because it's also your valedictory], following it up with a strong second album and then losing a sense of direction and heading off into the dinosaur territory that punk was supposed to despise with a double and then a triple album [putting the Clash on course for some sort of vinyl disc Fibonacci sequence : 1,1,2,3 … an idea that prog rockers would have loved]. Fortunately somebody in CBS Towers had the sense to remember that the Clash were supposed to be a punk band before they continued the sequence with a 5 disc behemoth and instead we have the single disc that is "Combat Rock" [although Wiki tells me it was originally planned to be two discs] .So "Combat Rock", without the experimentation and variation that marked their previous two outings sits fairly firmly in a rock/reggae groove making it perhaps the most accessible set of songs in the Clash's varied oeuvre. Yes there are a couple of why-did they bothers, "Sean Flynn" feels unthought-through and "Death Is A Star" belongs somewhere else [on the studio floor perhaps?], but overall it's far more danceable than its predecessors; and with four A-sided singles from the twelve tracks: "Know Your Rights", the double A-side release "Should I Stay Or Go*" and "Rock the Casbah" and my favourite "Straight to Hell" it's also more appealing making it the band's most successful release. And with the imminent departures of Topper Headon and Mick Jones it turned-out to be the real Clash's last.*Should I Stay Or Go, I have always thought the answer was pretty obvious, if you go there will be trouble and if you stay it will be double, then save yourself some grief and go I say.

Great album great tracks.

Good sound my dad loved it

It was this album that got me listening to the band back in the 80s, still a brilliant piece of work, bluetooth headphones up full bung haha! Fantastic!

One of clash best LP’s