“Speaking for myself, this record might be a snapshot of me deciding whether I’m going to live out the rest of my life as Eckhart Tolle or live out the rest of my life as Ted Kaczynski,” laughs PROPAGANDHI guitarist and vocalist Chris Hannah. In true PROPAGANDHI fashion, the Manitoba, Canada based outfit’s eighth album, At Peace is smart music for dangerous times. “Everything I’m singing about is still coming from being the same person that wrote and sang our first record How to Clean Everything in 1993,” Hannah states recalling the band’s snarky skate-thrash origins. “But what we’re putting into the songs now, probably reflects more despair than 30 years ago when we had similar perspectives, but with strands of hope and naivete. Now it’s the existential dread of eking out a life worth living in this completely failed society.” At Peace was written and recorded as political storm clouds were beginning to darken in the months before Emperor Trump’s ascent to power. It’s an album of poetic and polemic songs written shortly before the American oligarch’s suggestion that PROPAGANDHI’s home country become the U.S.’s 51st State. Songs like the album’s apocryphal “Fire Season” presages the climate-change-driven wildfires that wiped out portions of Southern California. At its core, At Peace is an album of inconvenient and unavoidable truths that hit with all the subtlety of an Orwellian boot stamping on a human face forever.
Shall we take a little trip to Essex? It’s east of London but it’s definitely not east London, the land of Blur, Depeche Mode, The Prodigy, Dr Feelgood, wheeler-dealers and dodgy geezers, Maldon sea salt, blokes who wash their Ford Mondeos religiously every Sunday morning, Tiptree jam, Grayson Perry, nosey neighbours, rowdy clubs, Joey Essex, Dermot O’Leary, Squarepusher, Basildon Man, a place where ring road towns lazily bleed into beautiful stretches of countryside underneath widescreen skies. It’s down the A12 and to the birthplace of radio that we’re headed. Keep going past Brentwood and all its TOWIE tanning beds and take a left into Chelmsford, the home of RAT BOY. After a decade of global tours as far afield as China, Japan and the US, a period that has included diversions into hip-hop, US-influenced ska-punk, RAT BOY have come back to base. Their excellent new record ‘SUBURBIA CALLING’ is all about returning to their roots.