Album Review: Dropkick Murphys - For The People
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Boston’s favourite Celitc Punks, Dropkick Murphys, seem to have been mining a rich vein of creativity since the turn of the decade with this new collection, For the People, being their fourth studio release since 2021’s Turn Up that Dial.
Granted This Machine Still Kills Fascists and Okemah Rising were explorations of lyrics and words by Woodie Guthrie, the man who’d penned the original lyrics to the Dropkick’s biggest song, I’m Shipping Up to Boston, but neither of those albums just popped into existence.
For this, album number thirteen, the band have returned to their punk roots and its association with politics and have been inspired to once again rage against the injustices they have observed, both in their homeland and across the globe generally.
Wasting no time Ken Casey leads his charges into the album’s first single, Who’ll Stand with Us? It’s driving punk rock, run through with a huge amount of Irish green, as pipes and whistles join the clean guitars in a punchy and powerful (figurative) call-to-arms. The message of rousing a slumbering population to action is straight out of Percy Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy”, a poem inspired by the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, which called for people to “Rise like lions…” to oppose oppression.
That idea of being fodder for the machine is a common theme across the album: School Days Over begins like Amazing Grace, only to turn into the horror story of the end of childhood leading to work in the mines, buried alive and hacking at anthracite seams until either your muscles or lungs give out. British singer, Billy Bragg, guests on this one, and that idea of aspiration verses reality are explored again on Longshot, a collaboration with Dublin band, The Scratch, where the blending of punk rock and Irish instrumentation is expertly realised.
Big sweeping rhythms and fist-pumping percussion of Bury the Bones sees Dundalk band, The Mary Wallopers, adding another authentic sound of the old-country to the mix on another reminder that “we are many, and they are few” and They (media, corporation, politicians) do not have our best interests at heart.
It’s not all politics and anger as the Dropkicks look with wistful nostalgia to the past, to tales of lost loved ones, on the more-American-Irish of Chesterfields and Aftershave, a tribute to Ken’s grandfather and a yearning for a long-gone simpler time; similarly with Streetlights, invoking a time when you stayed out until the streetlights come on, and a reflection on the father he lost at a young age. Both are unexpected tear-jerkers, made all-the-more effective when you’re the same age as Ken, and can empathise.
Al Barr makes a brief return to the fold on the fatalistic The Vultures Circle High and it’s great to hear him back where he belongs, if only for a short time, and Sooner Kill ‘Em First isin the Dropkick’s vein of their more amusing absurdities. The line: “if someone did to me what I let me do to me…” pretty much sums it up in this unsatiable jig of a tune
Pure punk tracks The Big Man, a tribute to Pennywise’s Fletcher Dragge, thunders and rages, Kid’s Games celebrates all those of us caught in a state of arrested development, and Fiending For the Lies sits with a heavy low end and unrelenting punk rage, showing the Dropkick Murphys certainly haven’t lost their abrasive and uncompromising edge.
Bring the record to a close is One Last Goodbye (A Tribue to Shame), featuring The Scratch once more and using gentle, lilting Irish tones to give the record the appropriate send off as it pays tribute to The Pogues’ fallen frontman, Shane McGowan.
This may be a controversial opinion, but I enjoyed For the People more than any record since Signed and Sealed in Blood a dozen years ago. There was part of me worried that the political aspects would dominate, but the band’s ire is balanced perfectly with their musical creativity.
It’s Ken’s band, but he couldn’t do it alone and the supporting cast of Matt Kelly and bassist Kevin Rheault hold it down, as guitarists Tim Brennan, Jeff DaRosa and James Lynch juggle their duties with providing supplemental piano, banjo, mandolin, whistles, accordion and assorted pipes.
In all, For the People is a Dropkick Murphys record, and a damn good one at that.
