Album review: Flogging Molly's 'Speed of Darkness'

Dave King formed this Celtic-inspired punk band here in L.A., but for the last several years the frontman and his wife, violinist Bridget Regan, have lived in her hometown of Detroit. You can hear their experience in that recession-ravaged city reflected on “Speed of Darkness,” which charts with unsparing detail the ongoing meltdown of the American dream. “I’ll scrimp and I’ll save at this pension I’ve saved / It should be gone by the end of the day,” King growls over a midtempo stomp in “The Power’s Out.” It’s the rare hard-rock song with room in the lyrics for a phrase like “this pending foreclosure and mountains of debt.”

Yet if King maintains a tight focus for much of Flogging Molly’s fifth studio album, his bandmates (on guitar and drums, as well as tin whistle and Uilleann pipes) employ broader strokes, pushing the music toward arena-rousing Bruce Springsteen territory. They come closest to that ideal in “Revolution,” a fuzzed-out hard-luck tale that King narrates from the perspective of a “working man without any work.” As he ponders the sudden end to a 27-year factory career, the rest of Flogging Molly lives up to its name.

Flogging Molly
“Speed of Darkness”
(Borstal Beat)
Two and a 1/2 stars (Out of four stars)

-- Mikael Wood

Comments

[Don't Blame Del Harris!]

Can't wait to buy it. First CD I've purchased since "Live at the Greek" by FM last year.

DBDH!

[Bigref]

I like their music, but there is little to sing about in Detroit except to mourn what is gone. I was born in 1947 in Harper Hospital and lived in Detroit until the summer of the riots. The city I grew up in is gone and it hasn't a single damn thing to do with the current recession. The city lost it's heart in fires of the '68 riots and with the election of Coleman Young. A crook elected solely for the color of his skin. Every year under his rule, the mighty Detroit began to crumble away until now, where there are only edifices to what should have been and a vacancy sign at the city limits. Millions and millions and now billions have been pumped into the wasteland that is now the corpse of Motor City. Homes for sale, $5. We rivaled the great cities of the world in 1962 when we invented "white flight."