Its my favourite Jam album as well as one of my favourite “post-punk” albums full stop, so I think I’ll invest in an original and see how they sound together. I was fortunate to see them live shortly after this album was released and it remains the best concert I ever saw – absolutely amazing music. The Jam of All Mod Cons, Setting Sons and Sound Affects was the antithesis of squishy—powerful, intentional, exceptionally tight and noticeably spirited. The fade features the voice of one Laurent Locher, bass player of Les Lords, a band of punks-turned-mods from Caen who drew a bit of attention during their brief existence but never really caught fire in La Belle France (or anywhere else, for that matter). In response to the horror around him, he starts to chant a sort of mantra: “But it’s a tough, tough world and you’ve got to be tough with it.

Our success at knowing how to flip a disc to side two is confirmed immediately by the backward guitar and choral overture that create the dreamscape that opens “Dream Time.It descends, unlike "Pretty Green", into a glorious new wave rocker that slowly dissolves into a puddle of dub-a-dub drums. I have no idea what the “frozen packs” are, but if they have any connection to my favorite part of the male anatomy, Paul is in a heap of trouble. In a broader sense, they're the band most responsible for carrying the torch of concise British guitar pop from its near-death in the early 1970s into the 1980s, where they passed it to the Smiths and ultimately on to the legion of Britpop and trad-rock bands that mushroomed in the 1990s. In fact, Sound Affects is one of the band’s finest and most colourful albums, filled to the brim with – despite the often bleak topics – melodies and fun arrangements.

If you've never heard any Weller-- on his own, or with the Council or Jam-- this might come in handy, but his solo years are better compiled on Modern Classics (admittedly, he's released four albums since that comp, but Hit Parade only touches one of those anyway), and the best non-album intros to the Jam and Style Council are the double disc version of the Snap! Sound Affects" bore a lot less of a punk or mod influence than the albums that went before it, and was the first Jam album to not contain a cover version on it.Ultimately Sound Affects shows a band that was being pushed by its leader slightly beyond their level of ability.