We’ll admit our ignorance and state that before writing this review we admit to being ill informed of the Dutch music scene and couldn’t even place Groningen, Real Farmer’s home town, on the map. But since completing our homework our audio world has been brightened up due to Personal Trainer, The Klittens, Frontsector, Youth Deprivation, to name a few (check out the God Is In The TV interview from January for more recommendations from the group) and the emergence of this DIY punk-ish quartet from the country’s diverse music scene makes magnificent sense.
To paint Real Farmer entirely as a punk band would be doing them wrong and their debut LP ‘Compare What’s There’ contains enough contrasting sounds to combat any such stringent labels while maintaining an undeniably punk rock spirit. Think Idles but more free-form, being as experimental and inventive as a group could be when retaining the rudimentary ingredients of guitar, bass, drums and a microphone, albeit with some murkily fuzzed up amps.
‘The Feeding’ strikes off at raw breakneck speed, only to be stopped in it’s tracks by the album’s first single ‘Inner City’, featuring strong backing vocal contribution from bassist Marrit Meinema next to frontman Jeroen Klootsema, reminiscent of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon’s Sonic Youth dynamic. Meinema’s prominence is further proved by the strong bass parts throughout the record, most notably on the album’s third single ‘Consequence’, the sparse intro of ‘Empty’ and the expansive angular artrock of ‘Wayside’.
As well as wielding a hefty dose of authenticity, the four piece tackle the scourge of gentrification (‘Gentrified’), the drug lifestyle (‘The Straightest Line’) with ‘Perry Boys’ taking it’s title from the Fred Perry bedecked 80’s Mancunian football casual scene, yelling “What you want is a waste of time/ I got problems but these ain’t mine”. ‘Next In’ feels the weight of financial restraint, begging “Take me to places that I can’t afford/ In front of them, the worst place to fall” and ‘I Can’t Wait’ and final track ‘Never Enough’ feel like they might just crack with anger and heartbreak.
When asked about the band’s name, Jeroen Klootsema said that he grew up on a farm so the moniker’s stating plain fact, but there is nothing rural about Real Farmer. There’s plenty of charm in the straight forward reality of their name, but ‘Compare What’s There’ echoes the modern, complex sounds of a loud and rowdy, heterogeneous suburbia, no muddy fields and tractors in sight.
‘Compare What’s There’ was released on 8th March 2024 by Strap Originals records. You can buy the record right now and it comes replete with a double sided A2 poster with lyrics. You can also stream it on all of the streaming sites right this very second.
We’ve put the video for ‘Consequence’ down below there so you can have a watch:
Edge of Arcady 