Sound Affects is The Jam's masterpiece

The Jam : That's Entertainment

[Purchase]

On November 28, 1980 The Jam released the UK#2 album Sound Affects. Paul Weller has said it's his favorite ("We kept to our fundamental sound but stretched it a bit") It was certainly the most diverse Jam album at the point, featuring pretty ballads, punchy horn sections, traditional Jam-style rockers and quite a few Beatlesque touches. 

The deluxe 30th anniversary edition of the album includes bonus tracks, including covers of The Beatles ("And Your Bird Can Sing", "Rain"), The Kinks ("Waterloo Sunset","Dead End Street" ) and Small Things ("Get Yourself Together"). 

Sound Affects could very well be The Jam's Revolver. Of course there's the "Taxman" bass riff on "Start!". But there's also some backwards guitar on "Dream Time" and "That's Entertainment", and some McCartneyesque observations on "Boy About Town"(which, like Revolver, begins with a cough)  and "Monday". Weller's songwriting and guitar playing, Bruce Foxton's bass playing and Rick Buckler's drumming are all at peak form. 

In the NME Paul Du Noyer wrote that "...it's a brave departure and an earnest effort to break new ground. Sound Affects is the Jam today , and thats what we need most of all. The new songs represent a band that's as vital and as capable of anger as ever, but more than ever before The Jam's attacking spirit is being allied to melodic invention., and to lyrics that are increasingly thoughtful. Ignore any suggestions that they're going soft of '67"

In Sound Dave McCullough wrote that Sound Affects is "their best album yet...a truly stirring record. It has a depth that appears impenetrable. My head is still going round with the possibilities. 

And there's this from Smash Hits:

At 22, Weller may have been listening to a lot of mod bands from the 60's he was also on a literary kick, when he could find the "tranquility of solitude".  He told MOJO "A poem by a bloke called Paul Drew inspired That's Entertainment."

Heres an excerpt:

A dead body on the hour,” one, six nine or ten – that’s entertainment 

A rape before the Horlicks, a simulated Orgasm before the Bovril,

NOTHING IS FUNNY ANYMORE.

That’s entertainment.

 "I was reading Geoffrey Ashe's Camelot and The Vision of Albion and a lot of Shelley at the time too," adds Weller. 

Borrowing a bit from the best, The Jam made their masterpiece.