Grant Kemp – Hard For Me To Løve You
Similar artists: 408, TITUS, Magnolia Park, Youth Fountain, First and Forever
Genre: Skate Punk, Punk, Pop Punk
You can desperately fight the world from the outside, always looking for ways to burn down the castle. Or, you can figure out how things move in there and make your moves from the inside. For artists of all types across the ages, this has been the fundamental question that has driven them to failure or to success.
There is no way to escape the fact that certain musical styles come to define an era. You may have hated hippies, but their music is what you’ll hear when they run a documentary about the Vietnam War. You may have had loathed Limp Bizkit, but they’ll be inescapable when they run a movie about Woodstock 99 and the end of the last century.
The pop-punk revival defines this moment, and they’ll be playing these types of songs when they make a movie of our trying times. Grant Kemp understands the power that the rap and pop-punk hybrid has right now. “Hard For Me To Løve You” is an exercise in giving the public what it wants even if it won’t admit it. With this kind of production value, however, Grant Kemp has assumed correctly that the public will find it hard to resits.
The Walker Roaders – There Must Be Less To Life Than This
Similar artists: The Pogues, Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys
Genre: Punk, Folk
If Shane MacGowan’s songs successfully taught us anything, it is that life is worth wasting on great things. They might not make you live forever, but they’ll certainly make you feel like it. Celtic punk, at its best, has a way of taking even the deepest blue and making it sound poetic, a manner in which joy is expressed like something for which you were destined.
The Walker Roaders are a band that has musicians among them who have played with Celtic punk royalty. They’ve brought the overpowering joys and sorrows of life to regular folk. And that has never allowed them to get arrogant. Their role is simple – they have to sprinkle a bit of poetry and a tad of grit over what otherwise would be a boring existence.
That is why, with all of their collective experience, The Walker Roaders manages to turn “There Must Be Less To Life Than This” into the kind of tune that slips easily onto most playlists celebrating Celtic folk-punk. The song plays its debt to songwriting and manages to make even tragedy and the hardest of times feel like part of a story in which, eventually, we’ll be the winners. Besides all of this, it’s awfully nice to hear The Pogues’ own James Fearnley still going at it.
