Ghost in time: Zeitgeist with guitar crashs

It's been more than 30 years since rock music was still important and had great relevance. Artists were not pop bunnies who sang with computer voices, but stars with guitars, poets, explainers of the world.

We look back in a series. Today we have "Zeitgeist" by The Levellers...

The fiddle wails, the guitars crash; Beautiful melodies underpin caustic social criticism, and all of this is crowned in the usual manner by cheerful, purring choruses that you have to sing along to by the third listen at the latest. These are the Levellers. Five musical moralists from Great Britain who, with their new record "Zeitgeist", will make you forget Pogues, Hooters and Oysterband at the same time.

Mark Chadwick, curly-haired soul of the successful British folk company, made his living as a street musician until the Levellers were founded, playing in the Paris metro and on Berlin's Kudamm. It was only four years ago that he and some school friends put all their eggs in one basket and founded The Levellers. Chadwick is not a whiskey-happy performer like his singing colleague Shane McGowan. Hiding modestly under a bad flat cap, he waits for the applause after each song before announcing the next piece with a downcast look. “Zeitgeist” brings together the qualities of the previous four albums by the Levellers, who named themselves after a radical splinter group of Oliver Cromwell’s civil war army, the New Model Army.

Lively rhythms meet emphatically performed melodies, acoustic guitars duel with violins, mandolins and a crisp bass. Folky tones also dominate on “Zeitgeist”, the first record that Chadwick and Co. recorded in their own, newly set up studio The Metway. But the group, which was founded in Brighton seven years ago, is no longer content with pure folk. The first single from the new album, called “Hope Street,” bangs with powerful metal chords, “The Fear” sounds like pure party rock and “Leave This Town” is a similarly fidgety slam dance number to last year's “Belarusian”.

The Levellers, who actually wanted to shoot their last video in Chernobyl but weren't allowed to, may not fit the cliché of drunken folklorists. But her music is igniting: a high-energy mixture of children's song phrases and noble messages, poignant refrains and highly dramatic verses, which made her "Discovery of the Year" (Zillo) 30 years ago.