Album Review

Frank Turner – Try This At Home

• 29th Jul 2010

Ozzy Osbourne once said that the aim of most Sabbath riffs, ‘Paranoid’ in particular, was not to carry technical merit, but more to cultivate in young fans the urge to go out, buy guitars, and start bands. This is a commendable sentiment, albeit coming from a bumbling victim of excess, and music that serves this role has its valid place.

Frank Turner displays said attitude in ‘Try This At Home’, however the extent of it is startlingly obnoxious, and his articulation of it is just crude; what Sabbath could satisfactorily express through pentatonic riffs, Turner feels the need to yell out at the top of his voice, sounding like Mike McColgan but megalomanic on mood drugs. His aim is ostensibly to cleanse the world of any music that is ambitious or cerebral by deriding such pursuits, dismissing them as pretentious (people who use more than chords I, IV, V, and vi are “dicks”, so I hear).

The chorus sees Turner preach, as if on behalf of some sinister syndicate of Grade 2 guitarists: “We write love songs in C and we do politics in D / We write songs about our friends in Em / So tear down the stars now and take up your guitars / come on folks and try this at home”. A rallying cry to the imaginary musical proletariat that anything that isn’t more or less a Green Day cover is unholy and must be burned at the stake, or drowned in a bag. The song celebrates not having an imagination.

If Führer Turner doesn’t want people attempting to write intellectually stimulating music (or perhaps music that doesn’t even involve guitars) then he can take his banal, closed-minded, pseudo-inspirational, happy-come-with-me-or-die-lucky smug ‘n’ roll and bugger off somewhere. It’s hard to believe this man used to be in Million Dead, because they weren’t nearly as vomit-inducing.