On The Irrational Library – Now That We Still Can

I must admit that when I first heard The Irrational Library, I thought Zappa was avenged by some vigilante poet as the world tears itself apart in a new era of racial tension and capitalist slavery continues unabated. 

I was awestruck.

The sound, fuzzed with a juvenile rage pent up for years in a discordant chest of a mid-life crises victim, was a breath of fresh acceptance that being divergent is a weapon.

Joshua’s poetry is weird in its colloquial eloquence that exudes both academic gravity and street fervor, and when met by the crescendo of musical acrobatics performed by Jazz innovators and imagineers, I believe that my year is made.

The psychedelic and inventive rhythmic vocal patterns he piles with words unveiling spaces between even the chords, there is urgency here.

The album is like a final assault on something unspeakable in the face of an impending global catastrophe of spiritual proportions.

Veering from crooning couplets to scat rapping about societal ills throughout, this music provokes a response from the depths of complacency, and for a writer like myself, I feel there has been a lot I have taken for granted in regards to harnessing my gift.

I might have perhaps lost my revolutionary fervor, but The Irrational Library has certainly forced me to face up to my irrevocable talent.

I can’t think of any current music that is comparable, when we have become so blasé about titillation and psychological violence.

And it is surprising that The Irrational Library has despite the mechanisations of both the music industry produced what is truly an independent vocalization of collective rage.

I am uncertain how long Joshua has played with this line up but the synergy is incredible.

And this album, which proves the experience gained by decades of performance, is testament to the groups emerging influence on a younger generation of poets.

The lyrics are as passionate as they are cerebral.

“Of all the freedoms that elude us everyday…” A line that speaks to the politics of humanist pride, and with it 

Joshua is striking in his resemblance to Gil Scott Heron, which gives an exasperated character to the tracks and raucous lyrics that hail on behalf of castrated voices under surveillance and bomb coalitions.

The album is an anthology of testaments of human resilience in the face of faked new spectacles and diatribes while giving name to beauty’s sustaining power.

While artistically they teach me to be completely free and at the same time vigilant, these audacious artists who were so far ahead of their time are crafting an insurrectionary sound.

When contemporary moral constructs continue to problematise dissent, would it not be fair to burden ‘the word’ a little, with hefty tasks geared at social re-engineering?

From the first track, the album is a defiance campaign – sloppy title disguising a full on assault on crafty laureates fossilized on shelves of dead book stores and other brain libraries.

This is music made by madmen piloting a plane on fire – mean and nasty, daring entire nations to stare at a runaway nipple rampaging through warzone villages.

On the next track, Baumgarten suddenly sounds like an esoteric Hendrix possessed by the spirit of Uma Bin Hassan (Last Poets) or both held Siamese by the vocal folds, dishing a buffet of barbwire truths.

“I Belong To The Republic Of Humankind” is yet another viscera assault which stands far away from the normative laments of socially conscious poets, it is dare from a man – not a juvenile.

There is “Haarlemtown”, which sound like a eulogy to America’s complacent indifference to the wretched of the earth, it’s a steel-toe lecture handing sonic verdicts on global self-mutilation.

Shifting from major to minor keys without logic or traditional histrionics, it should be that these songs are not for radiophiles.

Then follows that saxophonic infusion of jazzy randomness disguising a reprieve before a crescendo of bursting seeds; FAKE NEWS.

The rummaging is endless of course, track after track soaking me with dangerously lucid dreams and baffling the tedium of my life.

While Random Things continues with eerie sentiments of hopelessness strummed on a nauseated guitar, Joshua races his uncrusheable words strung with a grim disdain for bloated individualism.

Clearly this band is not a fledgling boy-band but made of raw hides looking for a church to blow off steam and psychic infrastructures of oppression.

But what will the world think when The Irrational Library topples shelves piled with pasteurized music accompanying sanitized poetry?

I will end with a quote which seems to be the only sensible conclusion in regards to how the music should be received:

“We all hear different music, and the stars bear the names of death.” William Blake.