Johnny Foreigner. Three people playing music. Unconventional in every possible way. Between releasing music with a frisbee attached to it (or a frisbee with music attached to it if you want it), filling a double decker bus during Tramlines 2011, therefore making it look like your average Mexican microbus and pretty much handing some dude from NME their ass back in April (read it!), the band love to do a racket both on stage and out of it.

So today they carpet bomb our collective ears with Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything, an album that might be a conceptual album (I’m lying, maybe) about hate, frustration, the price of tea in China and how music can be an escape valve for all those frustrations dancing the Plum Dance in your head. All of this expressed in frantic music standing strongly on solid lyrical foundations.

It deceptively leads you into thinking this is a happy punk album. It does with the peppy opener ‘If I’m the most famous boy you’ve fucked then honey yr in trouble’. It’s a fair cop. Some righteous drumming and a cacophony of voices are the “Vorágine de Viernes” that these musicians will spin you at.

Even if ‘With who, who and what I’ve got’ continues a seriously rocking vein of music, there is an alarming series of songs where it all starts to slow down, going into a very chilling, relaxing ambient. ‘Johnny Foreigner vs you’ is sweet and ‘Concret1’ is a slight detour into spoken word and some ambient sounds.

But then it seems Johnny Foreigner stops thinking, a lightbulb goes out in their minds and they yell “oh Shit! I gotta go dissonant again!” and you get another raucous number, like the paranoid ‘Electricity vs. the Dead’ or the simply too cool for pre-school ‘(Don’t) show us your fangs’.

Let’s go into the meatier tracks. ‘Jess, you got yr song so leave’, great one. If I were Jess, I would take the song, it’s pretty fantastic, between the powerful drumming and the cool guitar work, it really shines through. ‘Supermorning’ is mostly instrumental. It’s superbly upbeat (all about the righteous drumming) and makes me feel good and it has the definite lyrics for the album “those ghosts are with us for the weekend / dressed in last nights clothes / wearing hangovers like medals”. Feel your pain. Three kisses in November still haunt me records.

‘What drummers deserve’, well, if it’s Junior Elvis, then he deserves a lot of kudos and a pint of whatever he’s having. The lyrics are hilarious (if you’re Patrick Bateman) and the almost cartoonish violence (and livejournal-style passive aggressiveness) make it a fun one too. I think it’s funny. Wait, why are all three members of JoFo in my livingroom armed with machetes and yelling “Attica”?

Oh well, no one lives forever.

‘You vs everything’ is frantic, a desperate mix of guitar wailings, feedbacks and start/stop/punchthatshitout/start that can overcome your senses, a real strong experience. “I’m sorry to keep breaking the 4th wall / but I heard / She’s selling off our shirts / Yeah money’s tight but that shit hurts!” another cracking lyric.

Have I mentioned the brilliance of the lyrics? It’s full angry mode, but you’d miss it under the “hauling ass mode ON!” rhythm of the music and the slightly rant-ey vocal delivery. Gotta love something as spiteful (and true, yeah) as “the girls who turned us down in nightclubs are now pushing pramchairs round the city center and they swear that it’s not over” from ‘The Swell / Like neverwhere’, a gem waiting for you at the end of the album.

In the end, Johnny Foreigner vs Everything shines in this cold November (pinche frío!) due to a great lyrical work with deft rambles and a musical composition that skews around so much you think it’s a Mexican Microbus driver doing wheelies in an English roundabout (a huevo). There might be a theme of conflict and sadness appearing with certain recurrence in the lyrics but there’s no time to stop and feel weepy: this is Johnny Foreigner country.

Words: Sam

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