by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
Bad luck pops up around Mclusky with enough regularity to kill a less resilient band. In 2022, the band was supposed to go on an anniversary tour for 2002’s excellent Mclusky Do Dallas, but it was canceled to health issues. They rescheduled for Spring 2024 and I drove six hours to Carrboro, North Carolina to see them. Right before they played a new song — “The Battle of Los Angelsea” or “The Digger You Deep” according to the setlist I got that night — someone busted their kneecap in the pit. The ambulance was called and a ring formed around the afflicted, a kid that Mclusky bass player Damien Sayell would later refer to as King Louie. When the ambulance arrived, they took Louie away, and with his blessing, the show went on. A tense moment, but community-of-circumstances and good vibes persevered — the show stayed lit and no one (else) was hurt. Having fun is a team sport even amidst shit luck and accidents.
Mclusky released a double A-side single to fund their tour. They said “A record will be out next year. We just have to write and record the second half, but that’ll be easy.” A record that was not yet totally written with an imminent deadline felt like another opportunity for bad luck. But the single was great and it helps that Andrew Falkous (guitar/vocals) has spent the intervening years writing great songs by the dozen in his other bands Christian Fitness and Future of the Left, while bassist/vocalist Damien Sayell has a strong track record in his other band the St. Pierre Snake Invasion. The World Is Still Here and So Are We delivers on the strengths of the band’s core identity — noisy guitars, raucous bass, time signatures that expand and contract with little warning, a damn good time — while pairing it with their sharpest songwriting and a renewed chemistry. It might be the strongest LP in their catalog.
Thematically, the record tackles similar subject matter to the band’s previous records – hypocrisy and human foibles amidst a hostile and frankly stupid world – split between distant observations and performances of those observations that shatter all illusions of cool remove. This lyrical refinement hasn’t softened their approach at all: “Tell me a story without saying ‘I’ / It’s harder than it sounds, but so is your life,” concludes with the dismal observation that “She weighs her life in greeting cards / It turns out when you’re young, you just mean much more.” This is from “Unpopular Parts of a Pig,” the first song on their double A-side single and the record’s opener. It’s a ripper with severe Pixies-esque and quiet-loud shifts, an unaccompanied voice giving way to the crash of the instruments and serrated screaming. It would be disorienting if the songs didn’t make such a virtue of simplicity; the parts are few but they collide into differing configurations with mounting effect.
The simplicity and minimalism used through their catalog is bolstered by increased musicianship across the board. They haven’t come back as a prog band but there are a number of slower, heavier songs that do a lot to flex the more varied approach to rhythm while cutting down on some of the more obvious ways of maintaining energy. “Not All Steeplejacks,” a simmering dirge about disingenuous denial and the lies we tell ourselves to get through a day in a life, leads up to noisy, thick guitars that don’t quite boil over but set you on edge like they might. It’s a relatively understated moment for a climax, but the tension calls back to the song’s opening: “Pull yourself together with a barefaced lie / If that barefaced lie won’t hold, then you’ll die.” It recalls the tightly wound forward march of 2004’s “Your Children Are Waiting For You To Die” in tone and overall movement, but with a greater emphasis on melody in the guitar work.
There are two songs sung by Sayell, both continuing a bend towards the imagistic and ironic on a lyrical level ("I would give anything to be that cigarette / doused in aviation fuel" on "The Battle of Los Angelsea"), with repetition used more intentionally and a frenetic energy that better matches the band's current presentation. Sayell uses the band’s minimalism to great effect on the party rager "juan-party system" - "Keys in the ashtray, tongue down your throat / came for the action, stayed for the coke" is as complete a short story as they come - but he also adds a wonderfully goonish energy to the death anxiety and conspiratorial thinking of "chekov's guns" ("shout out the end at the top of your lungs / cause who's got time to be fucking around? / not me, not you, or the other characters").
The World Is Still Here and So Are We is peppered with some of the catchiest and most accomplished hook writing of Mclusky’s career so far. "Way of the exploding dickhead" immediately slots as one of the catchiest tunes in the catalog, as gratifying in its riff as "without msg i am nothing," but with a bit more low end attack from the guitars and a stricter sense of repetition and structure. Jack Egglestone's ability to cut up and reframe a pattern with a transitional fill or clever hocketing puts it far and away from the trappings of stiffness. “The Competent Horse Thief” has an honest to god Brainiac groove to accompany a character study about the titular thief lacking in a bit too many teeth after a heist gone awry to be convincing. It’s off kilter, violent in a Grimms’ Fairy Tales way, and absurdly fun, with the drums stomping along and straddling a line between militantly catchy and zany. No song is catchier than “Autofocus on the Prime Directive,” the rare song with a pun that enhances the meaning, features a start-and-stop verse with a syncopated hook that highlights the chorus. Each verse is a variation on curbing petty bullshit to keep your eye on the prize, while the chorus grits its teeth through the present (“I oughta focus on the prime directive / or forever be a side-man”). Every line is a call to action, none more vivid than the playful way Andy “Falco” Falkous sings “Better to jump the gun than be on stand by!”
No song on the record speaks to Mclusky’s current life as a band as well as "kafka-esque writer franz kafka," one of the record’s fastest cuts, which ruminates on “the weight of possibility” inherent in creating something that has no obvious audience. Falco has said it’s about a specific UK television personality, but the lyrics also work as riffing on how this weight held Kafka back, who famously asked for his work to be burned when he died, mostly unpublished and unread. A band writes songs; a band that returns to play the back catalog is in a state of suspended animation, not dead, but not alive either. With this record, Mclusky have made themselves a going concern again. They suggest that writing songs isn’t about inventing a narrative or anticipating how these songs might affect their career but about writing the best songs you can in the moment. The World Is Still Here and So Are We is a monument to constant process, outdoing others because you’re trying to out do yourself, but also a document of a fully locked in Mclusky – no second guessing, eager to jump the gun, and too good to miss.