The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 28

The Jam
All Mod Cons

In their first couple of years on the scene, The Jam blatantly modeled themselves after The Who, had the riff from their debut single jacked by the Sex Pistols, and toured with Blue Öyster Cult. Those associations alone paint a fairly accurate picture of the band that recorded All Mod Cons: they aspired to classic rock grandeur, sounded like enthusiastic amateurs, and were never really cool. Across their ambitious third album, All Mod Cons, Paul Weller sings like a stuffy-nosed forty-five year old—kicking his voice down a couple of octaves and swallowing the middle consonants of his words, practically inventing the Brit-Pop patois that would dominate the United Kingdom’s music a couple of decades later. In actuality, he was only 19 years old, and he had recently moved back in with his parents, after The Jam’s second album failed to capitalize on the momentum of the band’s first. Perhaps that’s why the music on All Mod Cons sounds, unfailingly, like it was made by a band with something to prove. Weller charges through about a bazillion ideas—rhythms, melodies, riffs—in just under 40 minutes, and he writes with a teenager’s idealism and angst.

Yet, most of All Mod Cons’ charm comes from the tension between the image Paul Weller wants to project, and the kid he actually is. He does everything a rock star is supposed to do—screams in all the right places, gets sullen a couple of times, really means what he says—so much so that it would seem like he’s merely role-playing at being a rock star if he weren’t so damn talented. Each of All Mod Cons’ tracks is written like a Tommy-style rock opera, frequently shifting between styles. But unlike The Who or, say, Queen, The Jam forgo showboating in favor of creating seamless pop songs—you would never know how sophisticated the arrangements are if you weren’t paying attention. Weller is constantly offering new melodies, but he never settles for catchy pop hooks. Instead, he obscures his vocal lines just enough to make them appealing without being easy to digest, drawing his listeners deeper into his character sketches and political rants. As a result, All Mod Cons scored a bona fide controversial hit in “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight,” which spoke out against the anti-Pakistani sentiment that pervaded Britain at the time—and was banned by the BBC for it. Ultimately, the album is a bit of a paradox—an overwhelmingly confident work of art by an obviously self-conscious dude barely this side of adolescence.

-Martin Brown, 2009