Like many of you, I have found hope to be in drastically short supply over the past few years.
Everything, whether it’s macro or micro, global or local, seems terminally fucked, and I’ve found myself caught in a no man’s land between seething rage and deep, bleak sorrow.
I’m not even talking about the more ‘idealistic’ end of things, either. Just the basics: I’m not expecting some sort of shining, golden future, just the not unreasonable hope that tomorrow might not be quite as shitty as today. But, nope. Things just get worse: the environment burns, children continue to get bombed and the cost of living a life you’re not particularly enjoying gets more and more expensive.
And somehow the ones who cling to a cockeyed sense of hope make me feel even worse. Any rallying cry for revolution or positive change seems delusional at this point. Not only does the machinery prevent such aberrations, but even if you offer people a choice that might make their lives slightly better, they’ll inevitably choose the worse option: they might not necessarily be happy eating shit, but they’ll continue to do so if you dust it with enough sugar and repeatedly tell them the turds in front of them are, in fact, doughnuts.
This longwinded preamble is where Straw Man Army come in: they are not offering me hope. They offer rage, and astonishment, and weariness, but they do not offer simple solutions that can be sloganised and splashed across endless different merch designs. Their viewpoint does not suggest acceptance, but more a sense that they are trying to chart a course that allows them to survive – physically, mentally, psychically – in a world that is wrong and getting wronger every day. It’s this quest for breathing space and room to manoeuvre that powers ‘Earthworks’, a scuttly restlessness reminiscent of a nature show where a small, not entirely attractive creature tries doggedly to survive an eroding, peril-strewn environment where risk – of being trapped, or devoured or stepped upon – lurks around every grubby corner.
I think, at some point, Paco Mus compared the band to both Moss Icon and Zounds. That sounds sort of nutty, but it is on point. The tense, eloquent, conversational vocals and zigzagging guitars definitely speak to everyone’s favourite Vermin Scumbags, but things also lean anarcho: not just in terms of outlook and sentiment, but in the sharp, staccato jabs and fondness for gloomy, greyscale, angular structure. It doesn’t necessarily sound like them, but if you played this record after spinning ‘Let The Tribe Increase’ or ‘If They Treat You Like Shit – Act Like Manure’ it wouldn’t sound at all anomalous.
Things are tense and urgent, but also intoxicating and strangely… inspirational. ‘Extinction Burst’, for example – easily one of my favourite punk songs of the past couple of years – makes me want to defiantly punch the air and gnash my teeth in equal measure.
The music here doesn’t offer band aids, or soppy palliatives, or weak moral get-out clauses. But it does prompt you to think about what you might be able to do to make life incrementally better, be it for yourself, those you care about, or strangers who maybe feel just as beleaguered as you do. It might be fractional, but it’s worthwhile. It prompts you to think “let’s try, at least” rather than taking a running jump into the global dumpster fire just to be done with it all.