t's difficult to listen to most political music of the past 50 years even ten years after it was recorded. Plenty of bands and artists were more concerned with politics than music, which quickly became apparent in their recorded output. Even the most artfully crafted and musically focused protest songs inevitably sound dated. Much of Billy Bragg's back catalog falls victim to this problem. However, he managed to also create a number of lasting, meaningful more personal songs. His work with Wilco on the Mermaid Avenue albums suggested that he was headed more in that direction- even though the songs were all written by Woody Guthrie, he chose surprisingly few political songs to perform. With England, Half English, however, he takes a giant leap backwards.

"The Blokes" who accompany Bragg include members of The Small Faces, Shriekback, Magazine and Fairground Attraction. None of the blame for this dreadful album can be placed on them. The music that backs Bragg's vocals and guitar is fun, vibrant and very much alive, while Bragg manages to drag most of that down with his stiff, boring and often embarrassing lyrics. The best songs on the album ("St. Monday", "Jane Allen" and "Tears of My Tracks") are the best simply because Bragg doesn't spoil the fun that The Blokes are having. Unfortunately, their support can not save him from the career lows of "NPWA", "Some Days I See The Point" and "Take Down The Union Jack" (sample lyric: "What it feels like to be an Anglo hyphen Saxon in England dot co dot UK"). The album is entirely devoid of any emotion and, to make it worse, he fills the rest of it with bland, half-assed references to better songs (Skatalites in the title track, Dylan in "He'll Go Down", and Smokey Robinson in "Tears Of My Tracks"). The "issue songs" lack any feeling or passion for their cause, the slices-of-life are uninteresting and the love songs are too unconvincing to connect with. It seems as though Bragg felt it was time he record another album before he found any inspiration.

Maybe I'm just not getting it. "Billy Bragg is a very English singer. He belongs to that particular strain of Englishness that runs from George Orwell to Tony Benn; from Morris dancing to the Sex Pistols..." wrote Will Hodgkinson in a recent Guardian article. Perhaps this is Bragg's most ostensibly English album to date and as an American I just cannot connect. What I do know is that until Billy Bragg finds a new cause he needs to rediscover his ability to write a decent love song or prepare for an early retirement.