Dropkick Murphys
The Meanest of Times
B+
The Dropkick Murphys have been making celtic punk rock since the mid 1990s. They are known for a few things: bagpipes, the theme song to the Martin Scorcese film The Departed, and their allegiance to their home city of Boston. The Meanest of Times is Dropkick’s sixth studio album.
The Meanest of Times starts off with a bang. The first 3 songs are monsters, all of which work better than any alarm clock I’ve ever owned. It’s all typical Dropkick fare: grinding guitars, perfectly arranged bagpipes, scratchy vocals, and sing-along choruses. It’s fast, straight-forward rock and roll, and it’s really hard to believe how good it is. I have to keep myself from playing this over and over again, especially the first three songs.
The album eventually loses a little focus, but never really slows down. There are no power ballads or sell-out songs on this album. The songs seem to blend into each other, with the occasional stand-out chorus that will get stuck in your head. My biggest gripe about the album is slightly kitschy Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ya, an old Irish anti-war song, which was the basis for When Johnny Comes Marching Home.
The Meanest of Times is 46 minutes of high testosterone, angst-ridden, sing-along punk. If there was any talk of Dropkick losing some of their bite, this album should silence the critics. In fact, one criticism of the album could be that there is no one stand-out song. Almost any song off the album could have been chosen as its single. But that’s a good thing when the album is as strong as it is.
Here are two mp3s from The Meanest of Times (thanks to The Culture Bully):
The State of Massachusetts
Flannigan’s Ball
The State of Massachusetts:
