Mother May I – Fuck This Town
I am not a patriot nor a city loyalist. And I look upon the people with great distrust. I am not alone. In fact, where I grew up, making place of the city and the people in it is a treasured pastime, a sport that only the very best jokers make a name for themselves in. You can understand how I have a tendency to feel a kinship with people who share this worldview. The honest, warts and all description of small-time American life found in Mother Mary I’s “Fuck This Town” aligns perfectly with our philosophy.
The fact is that most rock n’ roll have no other choice but to present the world and everything in it as a series of places where you’ll desire to one day travel. How else could they consistently sell this product to you? If rock music is escapism, then the honest portrayal of how living among savages wastes your potential and drains your energy is the very opposite.
Mother May I’s “Fuck This Town” is a Replacements-like composition containing the kind of words that even Paul Westerberg might not have dared put down on tape and would’ve likely regretted later. Musically, the tune brings to mind the 1980s American indie guitar bands. Lyrically, the song is filled with bile and anger, a good depiction of the 1980s and present-day America. Listen, most places are not fun to live in, and somebody will be saving you a lot of trouble by telling you right now.
The Irrational Library – Happy Ending
Similar artists: Dead Anyway, Oxbow
Genre: Punk, Indie Rock
You’d sorta like to believe that your rock n’ roll heroes are, at all times, travelling to exciting places, putting themselves needlessly in danger, and then finding a way to properly document that. It’s painful to imagine that they might be sitting on a park bench, stuffing their face with doughnuts and scrawling through pictures of their followers.
The Irrational Library likes to fashion themselves like those kinds of people, like the folks who are too cool for a dull moment. They probably knew about weed well sooner than you or any of your friends. They had a bigger brother who gave them albums by the Velvet Underground and Beatnik poetry. And, of course, they had a well-informed opinion about the Russi-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts long before they were ever on the news.
The Irrational Library’s “Happy Ending” sounds like Rage Against the Machine reciting Allan Ginsberg. It’s a State of the Nation address in poetry form moulded so as to fit the music angry music that might take off any second but doesn’t really. The words ring out as if produced on a mad benzedrine trip, the beatnik’s favourite refreshment after filterless cigarettes. Depending on who you ask, it’s all rather beautiful or meaningless. But, what is clear is that The Irrational Library have found their sound.
