****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
No other modern album has ever made the past come alive the way Rum, Sodomy and the Lash did. Folk music always looked back to traditional subjects, but the results were rarely inspiring -- a folk band covering a Scottish ballad, say, would most likely make it excessively sedate and mannered, with a well-intentioned reverence that is only suitable for dead, dusty artifacts in museums.The Pogues made the past feel real and important. In fact, among all the songs on this album, only "The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn" and "The Old Main Drag" have anything resembling a modern setting, the former being a drunken brawler for the multicultural age, the latter an inversion of the classic girl-gone-astray lament into a frank, unsentimental tale of drugged-up male prostitution in a clearly contemporary city. Virtually every other song, however, looks back into history in some way, whether by covering traditional songs ("I'm A Man You Don't Meet Every Day," "Jesse James") or by writing new songs about traditional subjects ("The Wild Cats of Kilkenny"). And the past is made to sound just as fierce and violent as the brawling youths, as cruel as the "cold winter nights" are for the prostitutes. The Irish mythos of Cuchulainn is entirely at home in "The Sick Bed..."This style is exciting because it is the only way that folk music can be truly genuine. I love Nick Drake as much as anybody else, but these traditional styles were not meant for soft-spoken, sensitive souls. They were written by, and for, rough and inarticulate people who were ground down by monotonous and unpleasant (and short) lives, and who looked to this music to regain a measure of vitality or to express defiance toward their inevitable fate, like the young man whose experience of first love has to occur "by the gasworks wall," and who dreams about chopping up the "Dirty Old Town" around him. Early death is so inescapable that it turns into something to celebrate, like how the character in "Sally MacLennane" leaves his hometown and unsuccessfully tries to "make money far away," only to die from alcohol poisoning the morning after coming home.These songs do not express or ask for much compassion. The musical arrangement in "The Gentleman Soldier" is even more callous towards the song's deceived "fair maiden" than the lyrics, making her "shame" the subject of a raucous jig. The traumatized veteran in "A Pair of Brown Eyes" receives nothing but uncomprehending loathing from the drunken narrator, who, however, is just as much of a decrepit wreck. Everyone understands that life was not supposed to turn out this way, but simply accepts fate. Perhaps the only meaning to be found in these lives is the fact that someone can still sing about them in a way that makes them real again.The Pogues were Irish patriots, of course, but strangely enough that theme is almost completely missing from this album (except in the purely musical sense). It is more overtly present on the follow-up album, If I Should Fall From Grace With God. But, as strange and sacrilegious as this may sound, the feeling that emerges from Rum, Sodomy and the Lash is one of purely British nostalgia. Of course, it is a very specific kind -- these lads don't have much sympathy for jingoism or aristocratic elitism, and they cover both the working-class anthem "Navigator" and the anti-war elegy "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda." And yet, the very breadth of these covers -- "...Waltzing Matilda" from Australia, "Jesse James" from America, etc. -- evokes some kind of imperial, pan-English experience whose span went far beyond the boundaries of present-day countries. This experience is now gone, and its loss hovers over this album and feels somehow painful. The direct cause of its extinction was World War I, which is also present here in "A Pair Of Brown Eyes" and "...Waltzing Matilda," and gives a peculiar cast to the anti-war sentiment, as if the real issue was not so much the horror of war as it was the destruction of this shared cultural consciousness. In that sense, this is an unexpectedly profound album, reaching something buried deep inside English-language culture that no other work of its time was able to perceive. The ghosts of history that haunt these songs give them an existential depth that is very rare for any kind of rock or folk music.The sign of a truly great band is that they write so much first-rate material that it doesn't all fit on the album and ends up spilling over to B-sides, EPs and the like. The Pogues in 1985 definitely fit into this category, as can be seen from the 2005 reissue of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, which includes six superb bonus tracks that seamlessly fit into the album. "Body Of An American" is a love letter to America from a uniquely Irish perspective (and, consequently, a meditation on both kinds of identity), continuing the album's pan-English themes. And "The Parting Glass" is the best rendition of this traditional drinking lay that you'll ever hear.
