Mad Ones – Monday Morning
While record labels, movie companies, and the lot are busy doodling away their graphs & stats, there’s a truth that escapes their attempt to create a winning formula for creativity. Rock n’ roll, one of the purest forms of expression, is, at its best, the sound of righteous abandonment.
This is what the Mad Ones are tapping into here. Monday Morning is a tune that could have been written and recorded at any time in recent music history. It’s the kind of song that blazes quickly and beautifully. It’s such a simple stomp of a song that the armies employed to craft the latest pop-hit would be unable to approach anything this good.
I’d like to think that Mad Ones didn’t even try writing it. It certainly came out that way! Similarly, I can’t quite imagine Marc Bolan sitting around with pen and paper trying to figure out what rhymes with “get it on”. Monday Morning is a garage-rock celebration.
What Did You Expect? – A.C.A.B.
Punk-rock is the one musical genre whose fans expect, or even demand, that their favourite artists write about pressing political topics. A.C.A.B. is such a song. While this sounds as if it was conceived as a response to some of the issues that have been under heavy scrutiny in the U.S. during the past year, the tune was, in fact, written back in 2015 by a band from the U.K. Some topics seem to be perpetually stuck in the public arena, for worse rather than better and are constantly discussed across the world.
While politics are a matter of endless debate, there are things that most people can agree upon, including the need for universal rights to exist. What Did You Expect? believe that this is hardly true nowadays in the Western world, even in one of the most developed countries on Earth. The band use the instances of media-reported police brutality as proof.
The song itself, keeping with the tradition of political punk songs, is a blast of angry vocals, power chords and barely clocks at 83 seconds. There’s without a doubt a well-meaning attitude behind the making of it, and the kind of sound that courts attention, something of need here.
