It’s six years since his last album, and you could be forgiven for thinking we need him more than ever. The Bard of Barking, Billy Bragg, returns with Mr. Love & Justice. That it was originally to be entitled the rather clunky Mr. Love & Social Justice should tell you all you need to know about a man who for almost three decades has been a bastion of left-wing political dissent.
However, although he is most famed for being a political song-writer, it irks Bragg that he is known just as a political songwriter, and understandably so. The likes of A New England, Greetings to the New Brunette and The Milkman of Human Kindness underscore the fact that, socialism aside, Bragg is one of
Much of the politics have been left at the door for this new album, with Bragg instead producing an album mainly consisting of love songs, like the tender You Make Me Brave. Many of these paeans, however, are devoted to continually opaque subjects, letting politics once again rear its head through the medium of the trusty allegory.
In opener I Keep Faith, we’re not entirely sure what Bragg is holding on to. A lost love, it seems, but of what? A woman? His country? A God? Whilst bigotry masquerading as faith may be behind the majority of the world’s problems, the realistic Bragg comments that a world without faith is a world for the worse.
Whether I Keep Faith is about
It is only when the politics lose their subtly and symbolism that the album stumbles. O Freedom questions “how many liberties must we lose in your name,” but it’s a trite, simplistic song with some truly grating couplets, like “defence” with “evidence”, with a rhythm very similar to Feist’s Sea Lion Woman. Although it is an admirable sentiment, and a timely reminder about the erosion of our civil liberties (ID cards continue to loom over us like a badly-laced jackboot), you can’t help think Bragg has chosen an easy target, and that he hasn’t aimed particularly well. The days of Help Save the Youth of America and Between the Wars seem long ago, and thankfully age has mellowed Bragg somewhat. Sing Their Souls Back Home and the title track have a political edge, but not in the O Freedom sense that it’s like being twatted in the face with the Independent. Mr. Love & Justice in particular is a feel-good song, not in keeping with the bitter cynicism of many protest songs of today. He is at his most acidic on The Johnny Carcinogenic Show, a sideswipe at the tobacco industry with what little merit it has softened further by the god-awful wordplay of the title.
Musically too, Bragg has progressed since his earlier days. Once just one angry young man with an acoustic guitar, for his past few albums he has been working with backing group, the Blokes, lending a more rounded, deeper sound to his work, similar to that of Richard Hawley on last year’s excellent Lady’s Bridge (Mr. L&J is available as a two CD special edition, the second disc featuring a solo Bragg).
Sing Their Souls Back Home is bizarrely reminiscent of No Woman, No Cry in it’s intro, the rest of the song with an apt gospel twang. I Almost Killed You is a travelling song, all skiffle-like and ramshackle, and Something Happened’s musings on the definitions of love and lust have a taut electric backing rarely heard in his work. Farm Boy is minimalist, yet soulful, another bittersweet track demonstrating admiration of the British countryside, juxtaposed with the fact that the farm boy in question is a solider serving in some forsaken desert, dreaming of a return to this green and pleasant land.
It would have been too easy for Bragg to produce an album along the lines of Neil Young’s Living with War, an LP devoted entirely to condemning George Bush. A few discretions aside, he has instead produced a warm record which reminds you of his song-writing qualities rather than his reputation, though which still possesses the trademarks of a man who, love him or hate him, cannot be ignored.
