Combat Rock review

The 5th album by The Clash and also their highest-selling album. It was also the last one to feature the classic line-up, since both Topper Headon and Mick Jones left after the album's completion.

Tracks:

1. Know Your Rights: 8/10 this outstays its welcome, but it's undeniably very clever and is filled with smart political commentary.

2. Car Jamming: 6/10 a bunch of interesting metaphors in search of coherence and meaning.

3. Should I Stay or Should I Go?: 8/10 while one of their most uninteresting songs in terms of subject matter, this has enough punch and swagger to justify its position as one of the band's most well-known songs.

4. Rock the Casbah: 8/10 it once again doesn't represent the band and what they do best very well, but it's a good representation of their musical skills.

5. Red Angel Dragnet: 4/10 aside from a cool Taxi Driver reference, this is more confusing than 2001 A Space Odyssey and noticeably short on charisma.

6. Straight to Hell: 8/10 on a musical level not entirely interesting, but it's filled with thought-provoking and intelligent writing.

7. Overpowered By Funk: 6/10 the banging funky baseline enhances this otherwise weak song.  

8. Atom Tan: 7/10 a perfectly competent Clash song which displays the rawness and interesting lyricism that can be expected from them, albeit with more opaque messages and less entertainment than before.

9. Sean Flynn: 8/10 a quietly affecting war song with an intelligently minimalistic baseline. Some more lyrics would have conveyed the message better though.

10. Ghetto Defendant: 8/10 as a song, moderately interesting. As a piece of bleak poetry, it's a firecracker.

11. Inoculated City: 6/10 there's some intelligent stuff here, but it feels empty.

12. Death is a Star: 6/10 another load of entertaining imagery without a real point.

Best song: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Worst song: Red Angel Dragnet

Summary: Clearly The Clash's best days were behind them at this point. I wouldn't rank any of these songs among my favourites by them. The music itself feels muted and some of the writing is irritatingly pretentious. It's certainly in no way an incompetent album. It's fine and still has the punchy lyrics and some of the energetic instrumentals that were in the other Clash albums, but one can't help but feel The Clash have just lost interest.


Final rating: 7/10