The Scourge of the Sea - Make Me Armored
Reviewed by illogicaljoker
The Scourge of the Sea is either playing against archetype on their new album, Make Me Armored, or exactly to it. Lo-fi alternative meets upbeat folk music, yoked tenuously to cynical love songs. There’s no politics here, just a lovelorn melancholy, but the folk roots (far from Simon & Garfunkel, regardless of the lyrics,( “Goodbye darkness, my old friend”) are what sell this act. Jaded, but not jagged, the album is surprisingly sweet, even though the poetics are often cliché (“your summer eyes were full of grace”), cryptic (“but I tied my love to the paper bag and I tied a jackal to my leg”), saccharine (“my sweet one hurts when she goes down my throat/my sweet one is a thirty-two ounce coke”), or all three at once. But hey, if the songs stay light even when the material gets dark, then so can I. “Smitten Kitten” is a perfect example of how the their types mesh together until they are a dreamcatcher of sound. Meanwhile, a track like “Hookers” is a testament to the playful stoicism of the band. As they sing about how “my lovers/they are hookers/selling of their fingers/telling me I linger/tying off my hands,” there’s an intense upbeat swing, complete with a classic acoustic flourish. The effect is that of a country ballad that has lost its melodrama and instead found a soul: in this case, in a violin. This is poetic deadpan with a pinch of sordidness (“You plastered up the door/you called my love a whore”). “My Sweet One” achieves a lighter denouement and an almost comic trill with lines like “was it goodbye or go/was it how I just stayed in bed/there’s nothing so sweet as just not being dead,” and starts to take on the rhythms of the Barenaked Ladies. The more melancholy tracks, with UK tonalities, are a bit too low-key for their own good. “Referee” is a stripped-down metaphor for perception, and while a succinct story, it’s not a gripping narrative nor is it a catchy song. Luckily, Make Me Armored does more to jangle lyrics and dangle emotion than to force an explicit mood, and taken as a whole, parodying bonus song included, The Scourge of the Sea has put together a decent album. [www.thescourgeofthesea.com]