"I have to admit that I'm one of the many who thought that a guitar would win him a lady".
A thing about Frank Turner that has to be appreciated, apart from his music which is brilliant of course, is his sincerity. Out of the five albums he released during his solo career, the first is surely the most sincere, not only with his fans but also with himself.
Sleep is for the Week is also a sort of break-up with his musical past. In 2006, in fact, he left the hardcore band he was the frontman of, Million Dead, to follow a different path. This record is inspired more to the British folk traditions than to anything else, but the spirit and the soul Frank Turner gives while writing and recording this album is faithful to his punk roots. After all, punk rock saved his life, as he reveals to us in
Back in the Day, when he was just a skinny lad.
The topics are also related to punk rock: politics, for instance, or getting drunk with friends.
Once We Were Anarchists is a manifesto of what politically speaking he is, or - to be honest - what he is no more.
If you are familiar with Frank Turner you certainly know that in his second EP
Campfire Punkrock he wrote a particularly angry song about Margaret Thatcher and her policies whose aims were to destroy the welfare state and to "kick away the ladder" and tell "the rest of us that life's a bitch".
Now, after only one year, he has changed his mind. He is "tired of saying no all the times", he does not consider himself as an anarchist anymore, but more like an apolitical person, saying that politics has nothing more to do with him for he doesn't even like people that much.
For this reason many people have accused him to have become a Tory, charge that he has always denied as true.
Back to the record, it is indeed full of great songs: such as the opening track
The Real Damage, which reveals how lonely you can feel waking up "hung-over and down" after sleeping over in an unfamiliar house, having lost your friends during the night, somehow. Among these there is also
Romantic Fatigue, whose opening verse I chose as an introduction to this review, a less profound song maybe, which can be nonetheless emotional and, as I referred to it before, very sincere, admitting his failures in coping with his troubled love stories.
A possible explanation of his heartaches can be found in
Father's Day, probably the most touching song on the whole album, a track which is extremely autobiographical telling the discovery of his father's second family after twenty years of lies told by the latter, and the awareness that Frank, his son, is inevitably following his example but also the anger and the delusion caused by him. The guitar riff at the beginning slightly reminds me of the one played by Bruce Springsteen in
Downbound Train (from
Born in the USA, 1984). After all, Springsteen has always been a source of inspiration for Turner's solo career and this "quotation", if we consider it as so, must be nothing but a tribute to him.
Other songs deserving a honourable mention are certainly
My Kingdom for a Horse,
Worse Things Happen at Sea and
Must Try Harder, while much weaker seem to me
Vital Signs, whose lyrics contain the album title, and
A Decent Cup Of Tea, slowing a bit the pace between
Romantic Fatigue and
Father's Day, but that is just a matter of opinion I guess.
Still, this album is a solid
4/5, offering its listener great folk rock music, brilliant and true lyrics and a valid opening to a promising solo career which still today, after seven years from the debut, gives many great and meaningful songs to the enthusiasts of the genre.
