According to rock ‘n’ roll myth, the wheels came off the proverbial mclusky bus when their gear got stolen out of their very actual bus somewhere on tour in America. One of them went to Australia and the other two continued as Future of the Left, who weren’t the same but were clearly the work of the same people. And now twenty years later here we all are. So to speak. It took about a decade for the pretence to start slipping. Following some occasional charity gigs as mclusky* old songs started to appear in the set. Inevitably there’s now an actual new record.
The good news is, it’s great. Not at all the sort of crushing disappointment that drives so many of their songs. They have found the sweet spot here between revisiting the past and making reckless updates to their sound. It roars and rages, the lyrics are angry and absurd, the songs are oddly but sharply constructed. It’s pretty much everything you want from a fourth Mclusky album. Realistically, I suppose it’s unlikely to supplant …Do Dallas in your affections, but you’re twenty years older and at least four or five more jaded. I mean wiser. So that can hardly be helped. If you’re only twenty years old, this is a great record and, as a bonus, they made others before you were born. They are also great.
They start with the visceral bang and bloodied hair of previous single ‘unpopular parts of a pig’ and don’t really let up. It’s lean and punchy, kind of an irresistible ride. ‘way of the exploding dickhead’ is a typical bunch of thoughts strapped to surging noise rock. Strong competition but I think “I would give anything to be that cigarette” kicking off ‘the battle of lost angelsea’ is currently my favourite line of the album. Frenetic bass and manic repetition drive the hectic ‘kafka-esque novelist franz kafka’ while ‘not all steeple jacks’ has a weird sing song quality that brings out the strong sense of melody that lurks below the surface of their songs.
Recent single ‘chekhov’s guns’ has some particularly great guitar wonk and across the album they manage to shuffle their sound around keeping it interesting without losing a grip on it. Among these ‘cops and coppers’ has a Clash like skank about it, which might be a band in joke. It’s never clear. They’re still expert in walking the fine line between songs filled with sharp wit and becoming merely amusing.
Mclusky songs are often contradictory spaces in which desperation and anger are distanced by blank perspectives and dark humour. You know, the way you do in real life. Because we can’t just go around losing our shit in the supermarket every week, apparently. The horrors are underlined by tense repetition and undercut by mundanities. Mostly the raw emotions are expressed sonically or leak out between the lines but when Falko yelps “I’m just a normal man, I’m not a people, a people, person” I felt that in my introvert heart (while also sort of hoping he’d add “we’re just innocent men”). Absolutely first rate return to the fray.
