Album Review: Doctors of Madness - "Dark Times"

 

"So this is what they mean when they talk about freedom" intones Doctors of Madness frontman Richard Strange on opening track So Many Ways To Hurt You. From the sound of his voice and the lyrics which paint a brutal but depressingly spot-on picture of a 1984 style surveillance state where tyrannical politicians and slavering tabloid press journalists are forever looking for big mouthed dissidents to brutally knock down and victimise so they can make an example of them, I would say he's somewhat less than convinced...

There's a lot of bands through history who have been cursed by breaking on to the scene at precisely the wrong time but Doctors of Madness really were desperately unlucky to emerge blinking into the sunlight when they did in 1975, a bit of a nothing year for music to put it mildly. Three years earlier and they'd have been perfectly positioned to ride in Bowie and Roxy Music's jetstream, three years later they'd have fit in perfectly with the PIL/Magazine post-punk scene.

More fool time though because in Dark Times, the band have delivered one of the standout albums of 2019, a damning inditement of the times we live in and all the more of an essential listen for it. Scarier still to think in retrospect that these songs were written before we were cursed with our current buffoon of a PM and his ghoulish chief advisor, before we were cursed with a main opposition seemingly abandoning all its principles under its odious new leader in favour of cravenly trying to court a tabloid press which would never give them the time of day anyway and before the upcoming US presidential election degenerated into the "Senile Sex Pest #1 vs Senile Sex Pest #2" debacle that it's become. Let alone Covid. But I'm getting ahead of myself there.

On here you'll hear hints of everyone from the Sisters of Mercy (the pounding Make It Stop featuring backing vocals from Def Leppard's Joe Elliott of all people and the debunking of hackneyed rockstar myths that is Perfect Way To Die) through Roxy Music (the sax-led Walk of Shame) to Berlin-era Bowie (This Kind of Failure could almost be Heroes' darker more cynical cousin if you squint a bit particularly the soaring Carlos Alomar style guitar line).

They save the best till last though - the ten minute title track on here is a real Ginsberg-style howl from the edge of the abyss looking at the state of the world and its desensitised population today and wondering just how the hell we got here. "You should know the truth my friend, and the truth will drive you mad" growls Strange ominously. He's not wrong.

Dark Times doesn't offer any solution to the problems we find ourselves in but rather holds up a mirror daring you to face the horror - another way in which it reminds me of the Sisters a bit. But if you've been feeling a bit despairing of it all of late (and let's be honest, I think most of us have), Dark Times will at least reassure you that there are others out there who are feeling the pain every bit as much as you are.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑 (9/10)

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