Manchester's Improving Daily

Edward II have a history going back to the early 80s. The British-Jamaican nonet features a three-strong brass section, the rhythm section of The Naturalites and singer Glen Latouche. For this album they have taken sure and rocksteady steps back to the industrial Manchester of the broadside ballads – the social media of that age – which were sung around the Northern Quarter's markets and pubs frequented by two young men of future renown, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The band steer their craft deftly across ballads addressing the Peterloo massacre, the 1872 flooding of central Manchester and the Chartist demos at Salford's Kensal Moor. They have a warm, relaxed style that suits the songs, subjects and stories. They add to this Ewan MacColl's ‘Dirty Old Town’, an unexpected gem in a cover of New Order's ‘Love Vigilante’ and instrumental versions of three ballads – not to forget four unaccompanied songs from local singer and historian Jennifer Reid and an excellent illustrated booklet by David Jennings. This set of songs shouts across the barricades between the Industrial Revolution and today's highly conflicted 21st-century social and political landscape.