Dropping a Mean, Lean CD

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Irish Voice Entertainment

Dropping a Mean, Lean CD

October 4, 2007

By Mike Farragher

BRUCE Springsteen made a name for himself by writing rock and roll poetry about the working class of the Jersey Shore, and while there may not be much in common between The Boss and Boston’s Dropkick Murphys on the surface, the themes of their songs are remarkably similar. This snarling punk rock outfit has just released its sixth full length CD, The Meanest of Times, and there are vivid photographs of the downtrodden lurking beneath the tide of angry punk energy.

They couldn’t have picked a better title for the CD. The characters in the songs are as far away from the trappings of a 14,000 Dow Jones Industrial average or a weekend home,

You’re more apt to see this crowd is addicted to drugs, scraping to get by, hurling their middle finger at authority and a world that has done them in, or a combination of all three.

“She had excuses and she chose to use them/she was the victim of unspeakable abuses/her husband was violent, malicious, and distant/her kids now belong to the state of Massa-chusetts,” bellows Al Barr on “The State of Massachusetts,” a hard charging socially charged rocker about parents’ lives shattered by drugs.

On “Famous for Nothing,” Barr shouts a tale about a hellion thrown out of Catholic school. “Here we go/their gang went my way for basketball/my gang went their way for alcohol/when we met it wasn’t pretty at all/still the bells of St. Mary’s kept ringing,” he sings in the chorus of a song that describes selling joints on the hill while Budweisers chill in a foot of that famous New England snow.

Musically, the band was sired from the loins of Johnny Rotten and Shane MacGowan. Take a set of bag pipes, strap it to the exhaust side of a jet engine and you get a sense of what the Dropkick Murphys’ sound is like.

While we’re on the subject, bagpipes are not employed on these compositions to make a quaint Irish garnish. The pipes haven’t been used this effectively in an arrangement since AC/DC broke them out in the seventies.

It should be noted that if you don’t have the Dropkick version of “It’s a Long Way to the Top (if you Wanna Rock and Roll),” you are probably not as Irish as you think you are.

This aggressive wall of sound is a shot glass full of whiskey, tension, and blood, and it goes down with a grimace. If you’re a punk rocker, you wouldn’t pour your music any other way.

Amid the angry punk noise, there is also a genuine sentimental heart beating underneath. “God Willing” is a ditty about not taking your loved ones for granted. “You can’t say goodbye to a gravestone, it doesn’t work,” they warn in the liner notes that introduce the song.

It always irked me to see faux punk like Blink 182 creep into the Top 40 every now and then. Imagine my delight to read that the Dropkick Murphys entered Billboard magazine’s Top 200 Album Chart at number 20 by selling 28,168 copies in the first week of The Meanest of Times’ release.

The disc was also the number two top-selling CD in Boston last week. It would seem that their inclusion into the movie soundtrack of the Oscar winning film The Departed has broadened the awareness about the Dropkicks, and this success couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group.

They have earned every record sold through relentless touring and a working class work ethic. The Meanest of Times spells good times for the Dropkick Murphys.

For more information, log onto dropkickmurphys.com.

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