Word: clashingly
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With London Calling, the Clash have discovered the metaphor. It gives them new freedom to travel through musical idioms and political subjects, and they take the grand tour. While past Clash albums have contained many songs cut from the same musical fabric, London Calling races through a catalogue of styles and sounds that involuntarily brings the Beatles to mind...
Abandoning blunt messages allows the Clash to adopt musical subtleties. On their first album, they railed against society...
...Working for the Clampdown" is the only song on London Calling with the Clash's old bang-it-out-and-mow-them-down ferocity. The other songs employ speeded-up reggae, pop harmony, heavily produced ballads, or Jamaican swing to get essentially the same political points across to a larger audience. London Calling contains only one love song, and it's the worst on the record...
...contrast, the only warmth on London Calling comes from the Clash's idiosyncratic reggae tunes, songs of Kingston refracted by Brixton into an unruly, festive rainbow. They portray the down-and-out but proud, card cheats, gangsters and two-bit revolutionaries, using brass, piano, and organ to supplement the traditional guitar-bass-drums outfit...
...music it chooses, and assurance of a larger sort, that the further the world sinks into confusion the closer it will come to revival. The very energy of most of the songs on the album belies the sense of entropy conveyed by a song like "London Calling." The Clash have taken popular music and used it to give frenzied life to Bakunin's maxim, "The lust to destroy is a creative lust." They have elevated their music to the point where such grand claims for it can't be dismissed out of hand--an achievement few musicians can boast...