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The days are long gone when The Pogues could be ignorantly dismissed as a bunch of North London piss artists with little more on their minds than drinking themselves to death while desecrating, at one remove, a noble strand of the Irish folk heritage. Indeed, since the release of Rum, Sodomy, And The Lash in 1985, the band has both added to its reservoir of skills and become more of a native Irish phenomenon, by recruiting guitarist Philip Chevron along with concertina, cittern and banjo player Terry Woods, a musician of immense experience whose experimental work in the '60s and '70s helped shape the course of Irish folk rock.
Nor is it any accident that the group keeps popping up in the charts (with The Dubliners last year on The Irish Rover, currently with Kirsty MacColl on Fairytale Of New York) and while Shane MacGowan revels in his comic image as a gormless buffoon, he continues to apply a singularly acute mind of the business of making music.
There is nothing inarticulate, for instance, about the rich, vicious language he uses in Birmingham Six to describe the predicament of being Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time; and the slew of cheerfully obscene invective which he musters during the tempo reel, Bottle Of Smoke, evokes precise images of rough hands clasping straight glasses in smoke-filled, wooden-floored bars. These songs and the title tracks are old-style The Pogues, as dependably garrulous and irreverent as ever, but the album also advances on new fronts with a gleeful sense of adventure.
American visions abound in a sequence that starts with Fairytale In New York, continues with an extraordinary big band, neo--West Side Story- instrumental, Metropolis, and winds up with Thousands Are Sailing, an epic song with a lyric that echoes the Celtic emigration theme of The Proclaimers' Letter From America, and which could be just as big a hit single.
The band is on superlative form during sustained bouts of cultural ransacking that extend as far afield as the Mediterranean for Turkish Song Of The Damned, and beyond for Fiesta, with its bizarre makeshift carnival sound complete with tijuana brass and what could be zydeco accordion. Elsewhere, on songs like Lullabye Of London and The Broad Majestic Shannon, Shane MacGowan's bronchial brogue draws out the thread of poignant melancholia that is rapidly becoming the group's strongest card.
Not content with upsetting the folk applecart, The Pogues have proceeded to erect an exotic fruit stall of their own.
Q Rating: 4