by Arthur Velez (@chillguy4000)
As artists bounce around an increasingly underfunded landscape, social media’s rickety scaffolding supports an illusion that life as an Indie Music Content Creator is as important as writing good music. But what we lose while scrambling for Spotify's pennies is creativity for the sake of creativity: we don't need more manufactured weirdos, we need more weirdos. Thankfully, there’s something different happening in Cincinnati’s punk underground, where The Drin’s Dylan McCartney has spent the better part of a decade crafting simmering, genre-bending post-punk without much more than a Bandcamp page - and his work has paid off. In a sea of sameness and perversions of originality, The Drin, which has evolved from a solo project into a six piece band, exist in a singular space. Their gothic, cosmic, Choose Your Own Adventure of a new record, I Lost My Way For Centuries, is an apex of worldbuilding.
Digging into the double LP’s 23 songs is a mesmerizing trip. McCartney and his bandmates settle in for an hour and fifteen minutes of twists and turns, expanding on a sonic melange they began to explore on their excellent 2024 LP, Elude the Torch. Here, bouzouki (a string instrument most often found in Greek and Irish folk music), 12-string acoustic guitar, tenor and alto saxophone, aerophone, tambourine, harmonica and shakers act like flares, illuminating a path through which the band is able to weave. The bouzouki and 12-string, specifically, add an air of the medieval, casting otherworldly twangs. This is post-punk in the truest sense: inventively stretching the genre without sacrificing a sense of magnetism and raw intensity.
When the record's heft threatens to pull things under water, it’s buoyed by a level of immersiveness and range. Along the journey, you will find the bounce of baggy Brit Pop (“The Sky Has Lost the Smile”), Ennio Morricone’s cinematic scope (“The Port”), purring desert rock (“Prophets of Doom”), Stooges-esque guitar muscle (“That Kind of Water”), astral psych (“I’m Not the Door”), propulsive post-punk (“The Cell”), and even a dash or two of Mick and The Stones (“Come and See V3”; “Body Double”). Delay and lived-in recording fidelity add to the sense of a shared atmosphere, often dipping McCartney’s lyrics in a sludge, and turning him into an incanting, mumbling instrument. But every so often he projects through the muck with themes of unvarnished desolation. “I’m spent / like my last cent / like my last pound / like my last euro,” he moans on the dubby “Spent.” Elsewhere we are witnessing “processions to the fire,” the “sweet sweet sickly music of decline,” and a call to “cut the throat of destiny.”
The record’s sequencing is also a load-bearing wall of The Drin’s delirious environment, as songs fold into one another, bending the perception of what exactly the band is presenting to their listener. Three quarters of the way through the album, the title track’s double time hi-hats rescue you from a hazy soup, and hoist you into a lilting gallop, followed by a five song run to the album’s conclusion that showcases the breadth of the group’s universe. At the end of the day, long track lists can be easy to balk at, but make no mistake, I Lost My Way For Centuries isn’t a throw-everything-at-the-wall experiment, it is the product of volition.
So, why don’t we do as The Drin do, and keep it strange? You are cordially invited to a party held in a castle. It’s the one on top of the hill that’s always seemed slightly off. The hosts? They’re weird. They’re old, or possibly young. But, there is dancing, there is rock and roll, and you want to go. Wait, why is that wall covered in disgusting goo? Why is that man in the corner chanting? Are those people casting spells? What is this jet black river? Why am I getting on a rowboat? We regret to inform you that you can no longer leave the castle. All hail The Drin.