Heedless of the considerable peril involved in such adventures, the intrepid mclusky boys are heading back to the blighted shores of the USA, there to swan about playing their songs to the grateful masses and so on. To help things go with a swing they’re taking along a fresh six pack of tunes. Feeling reinvigorated and sticking with their habit of snappy titles I sure am getting sick of this bowling alley is a new mini album. Apparently they’re already half way through the follow up to last year’s splendid the world is still here and so are we, but this isn’t it. This half of an album started life as something for that ‘same great taste, less filling’ experience at the merch table, but is now getting a full release that coincides with the tour.
It’s a compact and spiky set. The songs are sharp and energetic with lyrics flipping from smart to surreal in a heartbeat. Falco’s words often feel like a crumpled sheet of stray thoughts and, for sure, he’s been at this long enough that it may come as natural as breathing, but it’s still a marvel to witness. A knotty string of bon mots and bizarre sideways lurches held together by over stimulation more than narrative or emotion. Middle aged concerns begin to assert themselves here and there, noticeably in the titles of the first two singles, ‘I know computer’ and ‘as a dad’.
The six tunes race past in under quarter of an hour, arranged in three tasty layers. The first two are new and might make the next album, the second two didn’t make the last one for reasons now forgotten. The last pair have only been released digitally as extra tracks with their comeback single a couple of years back. As ‘Spock Culture’ notes “in the nostalgia wars, there were no survivors”. Pleasingly there’s not much nostalgia required because their new songs are great.
I’m going for ‘as a dad’ as the pick of the bunch. Firstly, there’s slide guitar (and I love a bit of that), but then the lyrics are remarkable and it makes a catchy and obscure chorus out of “in the piranha was another piranha” (is it a metaphor? dream image? just fun to shout? who cares) that contrasts with the closing refrain about “the long crawl to irrelevance” a devastatingly accurate jab at parenthood wherever you’re placing yourself. Mostly it’s pretty much as good as anything they’ve ever done and it’s got an absolute cracker of a video as a bonus too. Set in some hallucinatory pub of the deep psyche, vivid with life and unease. As always with mclusky there’s biting tunes, dark wit, and terse wisdom. What else do you want? Have you watched that clip yet? Do it.
