Frank Turner is a rabble-rousing folk-rocker who blends old-school ideals with 21st century sensibilities. This quick-witted, silver-tongued Brit combines the social conscience and wit of Woody Guthrie, the wry populism of Billy Bragg and the anthemic melodies and fist-pumping choruses of the Waterboys. It’s a potent combination and a lot of fun.
Love, Ire & Song was released in England in 2005, according to Turner’s Web site. It had a limited U.S. release in 2008, but Anti-, the Los Angeles-based major independent label, has re-released it here now that it has signed Turner stateside. A new album is scheduled for September on both sides of the pond.
This album has 12 tracks, and there’s not a slacker in the bunch. It kicks off with an anthemic statement of Turner’s core beliefs, “I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous.” Lines like “The only thing that’s left to do is live,” give way to “The only thing that’s left to do it get another round in at the bar.” As with many of his songs, it starts at about a medium level of intensity and rises to an emotional crescendo, then drops off to a wry or ironic anti-climax. Like some sort of hybrid of Bragg and Kris Kristofferson, his delivery is somewhere between speaking, singing and shouting.
Many of the songs have similarly clever titles as that first one. The second track, an upbeat rocker with the uplifting refrain of “get up, get down and get outside,” is called “Reasons Not To Be An Idiot.” The third, with its singalong chorus of “I won’t sit down, and I won’t shut up, and most of all I will not grow up,” goes by “Photosynthesis.” They’re all full of delightful wordplay, like this line from “Substitute”: “If music were the food of love, then I’d be a fat romantic slob.” It’s a litany of the girlfriends he has gone through and how his music is now a substitute for love — wrily romantic, it is.
The title track finds Turner at his most Guthrie-esque. It’s a talked-sung ballad of disillusionment: “Punk rock didn’t live up to what I’d hoped it could be, and all the things that I believed with all my heart when I was young are just coasters for beer and clean surfaces for drugs …” But he ends up dragging everybody in the bar out into the street for a workers’ parade, so they can at least play at being the radicals they were when they were young and didn’t have families to support.
It’s not all politics and disillusionment, though. “Better Half” and the final track, “Jet Lag” are both lovely piano ballads that remind me of the early, passionate Elton John. “To Take You Home” is dramatic folk-rock in the form of an old English battle folksong — lots of acoustic strings over a march-like rhythm supplied by deep tom-toms. But it’s a romantic love song of sorts: “And who’d have thought that a French kiss from a Parisian girl could capture the heart of an English boy?” he asks early on. “A Love Worth Keeping” is another slow march of a rocker, in a melancholy minor key — it would fit snugly with anything by The Decemberists.
If this album were a 2009 release it would have a good shot at my Top 10 list. As it is, I eagerly await the new one. Frank Turner is generating a lot of buzz here in the States, and with good reason.
(Anti, 2009; original release Xtra Mile, 2005)
