Dropkick Murphys
The Dropkick Murphys are hockey freaks, not soccer hooligans. Most of their recorded bagpipes come from the creaky Scottish torture device most familiar to us yanks, not the sweeter-sounding Irish variety. Not least, the Celtic lilt of the band’s two singers is a put-on. So despite their clover-brandishing Irishness, the Dropkick Murphys are as American as pizza or chop suey. And Blackout, the group’s fourth full-length studio album, is the work of a powerful punk-rock sextet whose cultural fixation threatens to turn it into a novelty act.
Perhaps the album’s clunkiest bit of boilerplate, the broguey, Pogues-indebted duet “The Dirty Glass,” not only contains no romance but also requires you to stretch your imagination across the Atlantic in order to accept it. “Kiss Me I’m Shitfaced” is a close second, a stereotype set to music that by itself could make you wonder why Woody Guthrie’s hip daughter Nora donated unused lyrics for the band to gussy up, Mermaid Avenue-style, on Blackout‘s title track. The answer is the band’s hearty, populist-edged, straight rockers, clearly the first language of razor-throated co-frontmen Al Barr and Ken Casey. “Buried Alive,” for example, a guitar-seared story-song about a deadly mining disaster, is so boldly and simply detailed (And this would be the day I didn’t kiss my wife good-bye) that it puts to shame most current songwriting folkies.
Among the scorchers that make up half of Blackout‘s fourteen tracks, however, it’s the Guthrie song that best suggests the band’s possibilities. “Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight” is a shout-along about a bombing campaign, viewed from the ground. The words could resonate with different allegiances: London or Dresden back when Guthrie penned them, Manhattan or Baghdad now. But Guthrie’s only real allegiance was to the dignity of ordinary people who work, fight and die. The Dropkick Murphys are more equipped than most bands to craft an album that rekindles such a spirit — let’s hope they don’t instead go jigging into gimmicky oblivion, waving an ethnic flag.
