Frank Turner - "Love, Ire & Song"

Frank Turner - St. Christopher is Coming Home (Xtra Mile 2008)

Frank Turner - Love, Ire & Song / Xtra Mile

Well we're a long way from playing another Nambucca show, aren't we? Frank Turner has emerged as one of England's brightest wordsmiths in the last four years or so, due initially to his sharp wit behind the mic of post-hardcore heroes Million Dead, but mostly since his folk route on last year's Sleep is for the Week. I love both incarnations equally, but it's easy to sell the kids after an EP and one album. Turner has played festivals, house parties, parking lots, and Latvia. How has that allowed him to grow as a musician?

For a guy who made his mark on the strength of socio-political critiques, Love, Ire & Song may represent a second official stab at fresh material, but it's really his first test since he went solo in late '05. There are two significant shifts in the artistic direction this full-length brings: It sounds slightly louder than his first album, and it's as devoid of historical namedropping as ever.

To his credit, Turner himself has made it clear that he has no intentions of riding the coattails of Billy Bragg. "I'm not a protest singer. I'm not a politician. I'm a songwriter. But most of all, I'm answerable for my opinions and my lyrics and my thoughts and my actions only to myself. I'm sick of people getting pissed off with me for not being their little pet protest singer, ready to parrot idiotic platitudes about leftism at a moment's notice."

There's no better way to put out the punkrock campfire than by treading the same streets at daybreak that "The Real Damage" made so memorable when it first appeared as one of his earliest solo creations. "I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous" may sound like a Million Dead castaway in title, but this is Turner through and through rattling off his posse and the futures they may never have. "All that's left to do is get another round in at the bar," it intones at the end of a percussion swell delicately manicured with chiming bells and soaring guitar strums. This anticlimax inadvertently becomes representative of the album, the musical dropout replaced by a single line that roughly sums up Turner's latest lyrical incarnation. You may not remember how exactly the melody goes, but you know what the point was.

It now seems like he's revisiting his youth through glasses tinted by alt-country rather than Refused-bred hardcore. There are still the old barebones Billy Bragg-style one-man acts (with added flourishes that slow the pace on record but rarely hold him back live) and there are songs soaked in bitter Uncle Tupelo would nod approvingly toward. For sure, this is a different take on a personal history that remains as everyman relative as ever. This is one of Turner's great songwriting strengths: He takes the mundane and somehow makes it fascinating through a clever couplet or by exploiting a word quirk. Those are still evident here in some places ("And if music / was the food of love / then I'd be a fat romantic slob / but music / It's my substitute for love" is sublimely sung on "Substitute," for instance).

But it's been rightly pointed out that the drunken sing-alongs are mostly absent, sacrificed for more introspective songs. He's put the razorblade away on this album. Or at least, it's dulled by personal reflections that will have you hitting repeat for the emotive piano playing rather than the winking word twist. You'll remember "God Save the Queen" and the emblematic single "Photosynthesis," but this is more an album of mood than of singularly great moments. It's as much of an album as a folk-rock album can be. You'd be hard pressed to find an instant single, so I've put here the song that I feel has bridged the gap between "I Really Don't Care What You Did on Your Gap Year" and Love, Ire & Song. The aural bridge is easier in those terms.

"I won't sit down / and I won't shut up / But most of all I won't grow up," Turner sings on "Photosynthesis." The irony is that it's too late. Though Love, Ire & Song is shorter than Sleep is for the Week by one song and two minutes, it feels older and more mature in that it grapples with the complicated politics of relationships rather than the punk rock politics of kids still naïve to the realities of paying taxes and becoming The Man. What's it like to wish you were still that youthfully oblivious, to wish you were still there? Maybe this album is the answer. If it isn't, Turner has admirably tried again to make the hindsight of our early 20s just that little bit closer to 20/20. Beer goggles at the hug and pint this coming Monday. You, Frank, me... We'll talk awhile, have a chat about what we aren't doing with ourselves now in such great cities and about how we never call or email or even Facebook each other anymore and about how funny climbing the closed rock quarry at 2AM was that invincible summer before university life took hold. Tab's on me, by the way. I just got my paycheck on direct deposit, so I'm good for this one. To love, ire and song: May we never fully figure any of it out.