Black 47 - Iraq

So I don’t know which album is Black 47’s best, but this isn’t it. At an academic level I’m kind of ok with that. As I discussed in my review of "Bitersweet 16," the band had taken a long hiatus after Chris Byrne left. They kept touring, but didn’t write any new music. 2004’s New York Town was a huge critical success, and helped expunge the 9-11 demons that had been haunting the band. At the same time the band had been hearing from their fans who had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Never fans of the war, the band was moved to make their next album, 2008’s Iraq, an album of anti-war songs told, as they usually do, from the perspective of those involved most intimately.

After Katrina opposition to Bush became very common, but even in leftist circles the years before were kind of stifling. Even if you could find friends who wouldn’t jump down your throat for opposing the war, opposition became an exercise in losing. No matter how much you and everyone around you opposed the war, the Bush administration’s every action seemed calculated to piss us off more, and completely lacked any attempt at compromise. Given the massive support the war had, it was necessary to try to persuade people with reason, but the lack of any kind of recognition that something was deeply wrong from either the media or the political scene made me just want to scream.

The subsequent lack of articulate political music was one of the oddities of the age. The music was either inarticulate screaming, horrible groupthink-heavy hippie music. There was some really great indie music from this era, but most of it was either apolitical, or layered in so much imagery as to be inaccessible. Like, The Shins are a pretty political bunch but I really never know what they are signing about. So.

Black 47 are seasoned political singers. Maybe past their prime, but they have always been able to write music that is fun and articulate while being able to avoid groupthink. This is mostly due to Kirwan’s brilliant use of narrative storytelling, and that is a flag flying high on this album. Each story is from the perspective of someone involved in the war, usually soldiers. This perspective, which should probably have been an obvious source of material, is almost unique in modern music. I’m not sure why Kirwan was the only one able to tap this source, possibly it was his long harbored and nurtured connection to the type of working class boys that join the military to fund their education, while most indie bands hold to their nerdy roots and “write what you know” ethos. In particular “The Ballad of Cindy Sheehan,” “Sunrise on Brooklyn,” and “Battle of Fallujah” are jems.

So intellectually these songs are pretty revelatory. It is unfortunate how, uh, bad most of them are. Black 47 has often made a habit or rewriting traditional arrangements, often to good effect, but the ones on this album are not super successful. And the band packed them to the front of the album. A poor choice that seems to be a theme recently. The opening track, “Stars and Stripes,” kind of sums up how I feel about this album. A reworking of West Indies folk song “The John B. Sails,” also of Beach Boys fame, the lyrics tell the story of the narrator watching his friend Johnny die after getting shot by a sniper. Unfortunately I find the use of the traditional song distracting and forced, and I feel similarly off about track 2, “Downtown Bagdad Blues,” a reworking of “Minstrel Boy.”

In all this is not a terrible album. Certainly an interesting historical document, though I think The Thermals did a better job delivering the political message on “The Body, The Blood, The Machine.” There are some fun songs here, and some really killer lyrics, but overall the album feels forced into a concept and is musically a bit flat. If you are a hardcore Black 47 fan maybe pick this up, otherwise I’d pass.