Andrei Tarkovsky is said to have said that a poet is a person with the imagination and psychology of a child, his impression of the world remains direct, no matter how deep ideas about this world he may be guided. That is, he does not use the "description" of the world - he creates it.
And it's safe to say that The Irrational Diary continues to incarnate this maxim within a milieu of global poetics that seem to spell disintegration and decrepitude, by not only reflecting deflecting our social realities, but creating alternative vision of other realities.
If there's anything that positions musical expression on the level of the most sensual, it is that it's an art form that respects oxygen (breath, word and song) and it's always fulled with childlike experimental expression of exhilaration. At times this exhilaration can be perversely derived from personal or societal burden (an addiction to being perpetual beasts of burden); or often times caused by confrontation with adverse circumstances of being societal burdens. But voicing that angst and rage against burden-hood, as most of humanity is described by powers that be...is what this new rant against a quarantined global stupor is about.
Listening to some initial recordings of the band's new album GOOD BUSY, what I found is a unique sound probing the question of what “liveness” within our swampy and dejectedly burdensome contemporary existence signifies today.
With a slight deviation from the “live feel” of previous albums, this new rendition sounds meticulously studio bound, where perhaps the band had enough time to undo various elementary musical genres by mixing up ideas, musical and non-musical, into a bottomless formlessness resistant to categorisations.
And Good Busy is one such perturbed musical experiment, as it dredges filth out this proverbial swamp and lays bare it's buried gore with raunchy performances and verbal exchanges orchestrated by a compulsion to drill truths into cranial vaults of a freaked out global madhouse.
The Irrational Library is again precise about their disdain for societies’ conspicuous diet of "Burgers And Lies", adding a sonic dimension to the band’s exploration of sound as a plunger for the cesspool of media hyped socialised myths.
Side A seems mellow with compositions merging naturally with inner films conjured by poetic landscapes painted by Joshua's machine gun polemics - but as usual, the poet is SWEATING BULLETS even though bravely facing humanity’s morbid inner mirror.
And as billionaire luxury preppers gear for space colonies, leaving "Breadcrumbs For The Gluten Free" to burn or drown or freeze on a corrupted "Happy Ending", the music scrapes the proverbial gut of a gluttonous global family.
As the journey progresses, hints of recited diagnoses are woven seamlessly into multilayered soundscapes by the veritable solos and crescendos carving out an experimental space for new forms of vocal interaction with instruments on a wild goose chase.
This new album seem to trace the band's changing phases and a transmutation of their musical oeuvre which continues to confound the conventional and palatable.
Their artistic resistance to "what poetry in sound should be", has been a premise of their collaboration all along, exploring and burning scores of mind numbing syllables of sounds intent on blinding sedate masses to global catastrophes.
Through their recording stable FLOPRECORDS, the band continues to marshal a sound that both sounds retrogressive, yet introspective; in the same breath explicitly crafting a sonic language that unnerves and also appeals to any ear.
On Side B, the band’s signature confrontational lyricism and unhinged instrumentation seems to carry another message...a subliminal anthem of dreary joys salted by reality's disintegration - musical narratives that can't be consigned to oblivion by the mainstream which often lauds what it obliterates.
It is as though the band, through their music, are in phases of gathering evidence of decay and painting portraits of this ghastly time sonically for last generation living the consequences of their forebears tyranny.
Each track, like absent pages of a history being written by a billion murals on flickering screens of our minds, this is music for ransacking artificial sentiment of progress, by showing the rot in our pent-up prejudices.
Beyond comfort zones sold to us as desires, The Irrational Library is well beyond mundane sing-along and mind numbing lyricisms that veers on being ditties for a castrated sheeple, their art in sound is referencing wars as they happen, racism and sexism leering its face in all regions of brokered mass culture.
And as themes of insurrection and regeneration recur with grungy saxo-tones carried by amputated beats and drum slashes, and yes, tinges of disgust at the commemorated environmental degradation disguised as friendliness, the new music speaks to a shrivelled ear of a sedate humanity, while voicing whispers of hope in love and family and dreams.
With Good Busy, The Irrational Diary carves yet another anthem album that blends with the melancholy view of the world that is evident.
Images supplied by Renee Janssen and The Irrational Library.
