Mclusky – Mclusky Do Dallas

PunkPost-hardcore🐐
Written By Akhil Srivatsan
 
Mclusky – Mclusky Do Dallas.png
 

In my ever-evolving list of favourites, one album that’s almost always made it to my list of (ten, twenty, who knows how many) favourite albums is Mclusky Do Dallas. I could tell you it’s because the album’s thirty-six minutes of an all-out post-hardcore sonic assault. Or that I find myself tickled by the bakchod* lyricism and tongue-in-cheek song titles. Or that I think one of the things the Welsh band do fantastically well – other than, of course, Dallas – is identify that the correct length of an earworm in the world that punk spawned is under 3 minutes; they don’t get greedy, they get lost neither in their own heads nor in their groove. But the fact is, the real reason this album grabs me has a lot more to do with the emotional response it evokes than this sort of over-intellectuallised analysis.

The components of a McLusky track are simple: Falco’s shout-singing, supported by his hooky guitar and John Chapple’s crunchy, riffy bass, both distorted to the max, backed by Jack Egglestone’s four-bar metronomic battering of studio drums recorded in the natural, live-sound style of Steve Albini. The result is one moment of catharsis after another. Music like this is a strange sort of meditation. When you’re the sort of person I constantly run the risk of being – too self-serious, too focused on my own anxieties about the future – lines like ‘My dad is bigger than your dad / He's got eight cars and a house in Ireland / Sing it’ from To Hell With Good Intentions can take on a larger-than-life significance. When my brain is pacing its halls, thinking of EBITDAs, P/E ratios, CICOs, and psychosis, songs like The World Loves Us And Is Our B**** serve as a helpful reminder that I’m not the centre of the universe, that in the absence of care, the flipside to the success we all crave is the sort of arrogance that makes you say things like ‘the world loves us and is our b****’.

This isn’t to say the album seeks to be this sort of serious exercise in penance: it most certainly doesn’t. It’s intended to be fun, simple. And it is. It just does that job so effectively that it makes me think about the fundamentals of fun, if you will. About how there’s no better way to have fun than just being present and not thinking you’re what’s what.

*trans. silly? nonsense?

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