Customer Reviews
the jam`s best album... - By: J. A. lyons, 06 Jul 2008 
..this was the trio at their best, my fave album by them..contains excellent tracks (thick as thieves, smithers jones & the most underrated jam track ever wasteland) go & buy it at this price it`s a steal!! & then buy all their other albums.
The Jam's best studio album.... - By: The Bada Bing, 22 Sep 2007 Modern critical opinion suggests All Mod Cons is The Jam's best album. All Mod Cons is worthy of classic status but Setting Sons is the better album. The biggest compliment I can give is that The Eton Rifles (one of The Jam's very best songs) does not stand out -in fact Thick As Thieves pushes it incredibly close as best track on the album.
Another highlight is the wonderfully tuneful Wasteland but the whole album is fantastic. Tracks such as Girl On the Phone & Heatwave are sometimes criticised when this album is reviewed but I'm a big fan of these & cannot see why this album is not listed more frequentlyin best ever albums lists.
It is the best album from one of Britain's greatest ever bands.
The Jam cement their place as the most exciting band of the time. - By: Mr. A. S. T. Bateman, 04 Sep 2007 This album releasedin 1979 when Paul Weller was a mere 22 years old was originally intended to be a concept album with a common theme running through it, that of putting away the childish & nostalgic thingsin lifein favour of growing up & embracing the corporate world. Naturally, those who are familiar with Weller's writing will know that he laments the tendency to do this & his English nostalgia is one of his most notorious features. Some of the tracks on this album, such as Burning Sky, Thick as Thieves, The Eton Rifles & Wasteland are writtenin this mould & each comments upon this themein some way. Legend has it that Weller intended the whole album to reflect this theme but he ran out of time & material & consequently filled the rest of the album with other tracks, many of which were essentially made up on the spot by Weller building upon bass & drum jams by Bruce Foxton & Rick Buckler. The result of this are the inclusion of tracks such as Girl on the Phone, Private Hell, Saturday's Kids & Little Boy Soldiers which do not follow the same theme as the others. Knowing Weller's admiration for the Beatles & given that their Sgt Peppers album was originally intended as a concept album but ened up only half complete this may have been a deliberate emulation.
Nevertheless, the album is exquisite. The bass driven power of the harmonies show that Bruce Foxton was an essential contributor to the Jam sound & gone is the brash angst usually associated with bands of the late 70s, instead it is replaced by controlled guitar playing which loses none of the power but which shows Weller's emerging maturity as a player, loud & harsh is not necessarily better.
The real joy of the album however & what makes it stand head & shoulders above the other Jam albums are the lyrics. They are superb. Weller shows that even at such a young age he was a highly accomplished poet. The words of Thick as Thieves have been identified by the poet Simon Armitage as an exquisite example of British poetry, & quite righly so...
"We stole the love from young girlsin ivory towers
We stole autumn leaves & summer showers
We stole the silent wind that says you are free
We stole everything that we could see...
We stole the burning sunin the open sky
We stole the twinkling starsin the black night
We stole the greenbelt fields that made us believe
We stole everything that we could see
But something came along & changed our minds
I don't know what & I don't know why
But we seemed to grow upin a flash of time
And we watched out ideals helplessly unwind..."
delightful!!!
The sons never set! - By: A. J. Rabet, 11 Jun 2007 I first heard this albumin 1979 when at University shortly after its release as a flatmate of my girlfriend had a copy I was a fan of the Jam at the time but I was rather impoverished at the time & wasn't going to buy it on spec. I immediately went & bought my own copy even though it stretched my overdraft to the limit.
But then again what is money compared to the genius of the songs on this album tracks such as "Eton Rifles" "Girl on the Phone" "Little Boy Soldiers" "Private Hell" "Smithers-Jones" "Saturday's Kids"in fact I could name all the tracks as having some relevance to lifein generalin the 1970's & for me during my time at University. Needless to say as soon as the Jam touredin Bristol I was straight there risking being spat on to hear them live, which is a pleasure which remains at the forefront of my concert going memory.
BUY it now!
The Jam's "concept album" - By: Magic Rat, 23 Jan 2007 
I've never bought into the "concept album" theory that accompanied this, The Jam's fourth studio album upon releasein 1979. It supposedly followed the lives of three friends, but who they are, when they existed & so on is not apparentin any way. Were they the First World War "chums" of the front cover ? If so, only "Little Boy Soldiers" refers to them. Otherwise only "Thick As Theives" & "Burning Sky" seem to detail the changing lives of a group of people. Either way, this is a minor point. This album is not a classic, but it provides the ideal bridging point betwen the revelatory "All Mod Cons" & the stripped bare, "Revolver" approach of "Sound Affects". There are some great Jam tunes on here - all the previously mentioned ones, plus the anthemic hit single "The Eton Rifles" with its tongue-in-cheek class war lyrics; the amusing "Girl On The Phone" which displayed a rare frivolous side to Paul Weller's songwriting; the rousing "Saturday's Kids" complete with Stonesy riff & Bruce Foxton's only decent attempt at songwritingin "Smithers-Jones" (although the version included here is a strange orchestra-backed one, the superior one is the full band version, see "Extras"). A barnstorming cover of "Heatwave" ends the collection with a last nod to mod culture, echoing "In The Midnight Hour" which ended "This Is The Modern World". After this album, The Jam went straightin at Number One with "Going Underground" anmd their position was cemented as the best around at the time.
