Review Summary: The voice of a generation that doesn't know what the hell is going on.
Darrin Bradbury knows that the world is, put bluntly, ***ing insane at the moment. The 24/7 news cycle is impossible to keep up with. If you do attempt to keep up with it, the only feeling you’ll have is one of wanting to turn it off and curl up in a ball. Politically, socially, financially, globally, individually it seems like nothing makes sense and it’s hard to think back to a time when it did. We’re in a period of absurdity that seems like a script to a horribly over-dramatic movie. With his brand of lackadaisical, idiosyncratic folk satire, Bradbury catches the feeling that an average American has when they have to ask “Wait, what?” on a practically daily basis.
Darrin Bradbury also knows that life is incredibly boring. Chaos is whirling around us in the world, nothing makes sense, we don’t know how one day will differ from the next. Yet every day we get up, take a shower, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, eat some dinner, go to bed, and repeat the next day. Sure, an existential crisis or political panic might creep in on a regular basis, but we catch ourselves knowing that the modern proceeding of the world are absurd, but also The Masked Singer comes on tonight and, dammit, I want to know who’s wearing that egg mask.
Throughout
Talking Dogs & Atom Bombs Bradbury takes this dichotomy and makes perhaps the most relatable and universal album to exist post-2016. He brings the ridiculous and banal together in a way that makes perfect sense, succinctly summed up in metaphor during the title track, without even having to explain the metaphor.
“
The microwave and atom bomb are distant cousins.”
Stripped back and slowed down folk-Americana with a smirk is his preferred vehicle, and it delivers perfectly. However, it’s the lyrics on the album, always funny, poignant, and always real, that make Bradbury’s sophomore album shine. He is incredibly wry and clever, balancing between fun metaphors and bluntly stating the stories of an American life in terms anyone can relate to and understand. “The American Life” is a perfect example of these two headbutting portions of life being succinctly combined. In the first minute he lists off the mundane levels of American life, finishing with thirty seconds all the places in the world we can get a Big Mac. It’s funny, sad, and slightly more relatable than a person may like to admit. Then, on the second verse he plainly states how we’ve taken that mundane in this country and made it pretty crazy without questioning it:
“
The American Life is franchised fear and cow milk
The American Life is the presumption that people are dumb
The American Life is fried chicken taking a political stance
It’s a church built like a stadium”
All eleven songs across the succinct twenty-six minute run-time are immensely quotable and perfectly encapsulates this theme without becoming heavy-handed. Whether it’s about escaping the humdrum of breakfast by becoming the king of Cerealtown and drowning it oat inhabitants in milk, waking up from a dream where you’re JFK’s assassin, talking about how ***ty of advice the phrase “This too will pass” is (
”Like a kidney stone”, or listing off all the ways that a person might die, Bradbury delivers witty, yet surprisingly morose, lyrics about what each day of a life entails.
It’s important to address the morose side of
Talking Dogs & Atom Bombs. While Bradbury perfectly uses humor to help address these situations, he is also using humor to help cope with and mask feelings of fear and depression. Just because we can discuss the frightening things in the world and laugh about them doesn’t mean that we’re comfortable with them. The message behind the album isn’t “We’ll get through it all if we just keep living life.” The message is “We’ll get through it all because we don’t have any other choice, so we might as well try and enjoy ourselves.”
But the trouble with time is you can take a wrong step
End up somewhere you tried to forget
A broken bone or a heart that’s bruised
Sometimes I walk through the bad just to walk with you
