Albany, NY-based Drug Church return with ‘Prude’ (released via Pure Noise Records on 4 October) and it’s 28 minutes of heart-on-sleeve attitude and punk-meets-hardcore riffs…
‘Mad Care’ opens the album with a blast of aggressive, noisy guitar and drums with Patrick Kindlon joining the proceedings, declaring: ‘This is your situation, this is your circumstance, this is your fork in the road. ‘Myopic’ follows with retro yet anthemic hooks a la Turnstile. There are political and religious slants to the words as Patrick also laments ‘shitty exes’. ‘Hey Listen’ focuses more on nostalgia, which is the perfect complement to its new wave sound: ‘Looks like half my high school friends’.
‘Business Ethics’ specialises in the kind of storytelling that serves Craig Finn from The Hold Steady so well (‘Yankee Trails’ with its list of US cities and states does similar) as Patrick discusses a familial situation over a brooding bass line: ‘My cousin, he had an idea. He needed money for drugs. He went missing for days. Called his mum: ‘Please pay”. ‘The Bitter’s has a frenetic opening with lyrics about crushing enemies and making someone a target delivered with gusto: ‘Even parasites have the foresight not to kill their hosts’.
The album ends with ‘Peer Review’, a track that once again finds Patrick in troubadour mode, painting a picture of a setting that he describes as ‘Hell’: ‘I find myself here at home with the misfits when I’m supposed to be so much better than this’. He then backs down on these initial thoughts after some self-reflection: ‘A sense of self-entitlement runs through my mind. Who the fuck am I?’
‘Prude’ is a frantic but powerful record that will make you once again hail Drug Church.