Album Review: Laura Jane Grace - "Stay Alive"

 

It's safe to say that 2020 will be remembered in music as the year of the lockdown album with several artists gaining strength from turning the fear and frustration brought on by Covid and the attendant shutdown of the world into songs and words.

Against Me!'s frontwoman Laura Jane Grace is another to add to this list of people - this new album was originally conceived as an Against Me! band album but the lockdown saw the members of said group scattered to the four corners of the US and, not knowing when things would return to normal (as I write this in the middle of the second lockdown I think most of us are questioning if they ever will), decided to simply do the album as a solo project by booking out her local studios in Chicago and enlisting the help of Steve Albini to do some production remotely.

The result is, as you might expect, a haunting stripped-back album which is at once comforting and stark with tunes like opener Swimming Pool Song and the disturbingly frank Mountain Song taking a look at the loneliness of lockdown while Old Friend (Stay Alive) is a rousing call to arms that some day all of this will eventually be over and Hanging Tree is an on-the-money takedown of the frightening rise of far right white supremacy across the pond under the recently-deposed Donald Trump.

Sure it'd have been interesting to see how this collection of songs would have sounded as an Against Me! album but Stay Alive is an intriguing look at the other side of Laura's oeuvre and shows that she's certainly got more arrows to her bow than the furious no-nonsense hardcore punk of her day job. A comforting voice in these hard times which details the pain and suffering but infuses it with the message to keep on going, this is a much needed message in this dark period for humanity.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

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