This is Ska, this is for dancing to. There are shades of Dexy’s Midnight Runners in here with that violin riff wrapping around the guitars. And there’s shades of many a long night for me when the only thing in the world that mattered was the dancefloor and that the ska-ska-ska beat never ever stopped. Wonderfully uplifting and drunkenly self-deprecating hopeless romanticism. I have little understanding of how anyone could listen to this and not smile and dance and skank and smile. This is what I’d always wished 2-Tone had progressed directly onto, it lacks the emotional emptyness of late 80s Ska and it lacks the american pop-punk debasement the skater kids offered ska. It has the light-hearted fun, the “this is my life, this is what I sing about” simple social commentary lyrics and it has that wonderful, wonderful ska bounce—I’m dancing as I type.