mischief brew // songs from under the sink

Mischief Brew
Songs from Under the Sink
Fistolo Records

This is the new(est) full-length album from Philadelphia sweetheart Erik Petersen. Erik’s been regaling the city with anarcho-folk-punk anthems for years, and recently (on 2005’s Smash the Windows) acquired a bass, a drum kit, and several amplifiers to back up his tunes. The full band arrangements were vibrant and airy, while still preserving the old acoustic grit, and proved Erik’s musicianship to be several notches above the average sit-and-strummer.

Songs from Under the Sink brings this fuller sound to some of Erik’s oldest tunes. The album is the result of some musical spring cleaning—songs culled from odd comps, dusty tapes, and forgotten demos. Although the result sounds like the junk drawer that it is—don’t expect the flow and tempo of a standard l.p.—the balance among these songs is carefully considered: even as Erik revamps some old favorites, a good number of the tracks here will be unfamiliar to most listeners.

And this, as it turns out, is a good thing. Even those of us who’ve faithfully collected every damn thing that Erik’s put out over the years—from the West Chester demo tapes to the Orphans discography—will find something here to illuminate the more obscure corners of Mischief Brew. We get to hear Erik’s growly hardcore roots on “Tell Me a Story” and live his high school angst in “How Did I Get Out Alive?” There’s even a nice Leadbelly reworking (”Midnight Special 2002″) to round things out at the end.

The new versions of some of the old live staples—”A Rebel’s Romance,” “Dreams of the Morning”—will sound a bit jarring here. Erik seems to have outgrown the need to write wistful ballads, so he’s lifted the spirits of these songs with a good deal of instrumental celebration. The tunes no longer brood—they rollick. Sometimes, it doesn’t quite work; but more often, the arrangements play as a celebration of how far Erik—and his listeners—have come.

mischief brew (erik petersen) // smash the windows

Mischief Brew/Erik Petersen
Smash the Windows
Fistolo Records

This is the first, real, honest-to-God full-length album from Mischief Brew. After the spate of tantalizing e.p.’s that this guy had been putting out, Smash the Windows came as a veritable relief. I was really interested to see what Erik would do given the scope of an l.p.; I was surprised, not surprised, and delighted with the result.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mischief Brew’s oeuvre: this is a one-man anarcho-folk-punk band based out of Philadelphia. The music is highly political, but, with its glittering wordsmithery and boundless energy, transcends the limits of simple political anthems. These qualities, always the trademarks of Erik’s music, have carried over into the new album. What’s changed is the instrumentation. Mischief Brew’s earlier recordings tended towards straight-up acoustic and voice; a more recent release, 2003’s Bakenal e.p., hinted at an expanding musical palette with the addition of some junk percussion and sophisticated guitar arrangements. Smash the Windows shows Erik’s songwriting at its free rollicking fullest, with complete band accompaniment and sonic innovation. The band doesn’t feel entirely settled into its new sound yet, and I sure hope this isn’t the end of Mischief Brew acoustic, but overall the expanded setup is a lot of fun. The heavily-instrumental tracks, especially “The Gypsy, the Punk, and the Fool”, capture the whimsical, carnival element that has always been submerged in Mischief Brew’s music; these songs really showcase Erik’s musicianship in a way that simple three-chord folk ballads never did. He has an especially keen ear for percussion; he knows how to apply beats so that they accentuate both the micro- and macro-rhythms of a song, always complementing the melody without ever overwhelming it.

To be sure, this record still has its fair share of simple folk songs; there is a re-recording of “The Lowly Carpenter”, and the bittersweet “Departure Arrival”, which fittingly closes the album. There are some revamped versions of old favorites: a souped-up “Roll Me Through the Gates of Hell”, and a more carnivalesque “Liquor Never Brewed”. The majority of the album, though, is made up of this new sound, and it’s really interesting to see how the tone and content differs from the older stuff. Whereas the earlier songs embrace the nomadic life with open arms, the new songs pose a lot of questions about what it means to grow older within the context of punk culture. What happens when people start cutting off their dreads, opening bank accounts, getting married? There is some sense of loss in these songs, but perhaps a greater sense of what has been gained: “Sure, there’s power in unions of ramblers that got nothing to own,” Erik sings in “Nomad’s Revolt”, “But there’s more in one fist-swinging mother, swearing: ‘My children shall never be sold.’”

The lyrics, as always, are in top form here. I’m always impressed by the way Erik can turn a phrase, but (nerd-snob that I am) I’m even more impressed by the number of literary/historic/philosophical allusions that he seamlessly weaves into his songs. “The Reinvention of the Printing Press” references the industrial revolution, Catholic doctrine, Rabelais, and the advent of printing, all in one song… and there’s probably even more stuff in there that I’m missing. It all tends to tie in, of course, with Mischief Brew’s tendency toward a medieval/Venetian/Irish aesthetic; these songs, with their words and with their tunes, celebrate a lot of old traditions.

Erik’s respect for tradition, his ability to preserve old forms while simultaneously updating and reviving them, may in part explain why his own songs are so durable. Fellow folk singer Robert Blake once commented on how Mischief Brew songs, entirely apart from their performances and recordings, have the ability to take on a life of their own: “Underneath the bodies moving and the hands-in-the-air singing along,” he writes, “I heard songs that will be sung for a long time.” Here’s to you, then, Mischief Brew: may your songs never get stuck out of my head.

robert blake / erik petersen // bellingham & philadelphia

Robert Blake / Erik Petersen
Bellingham & Philadelphia
Art of the Underground

It seems to me that there are few genres as loaded with a ripe potential for unadulterated mediocrity as political folk music. As someone who travels in activist circles, in the past year I’ve found myself embroiled in several heated (I kid you not) arguments about whether or not political folk music has any real relevancy to contemporary political struggle in the United States.

Now let me first say that I more or less believe it when people tell me that the folk culture championed by likes of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, and the all the lesser-known black musicians from whom they originally copped their style (see, for one, Mr. Huddie Ledbetter) at one time had a certain resonance in the political scene, no doubt tuning scores of kids on to the Civil Rights Movement and spreading awareness about the injustices of the American status quo. But now it’s four decades later: three decades after many of the original instigators of the 60s movement gave up on the hippy-dippy, nonviolence-at-all-costs atmosphere that is usually associated with the Dylan and his ilk, and just in time for the early stages of what will no doubt become one of the most apocalyptic and potentially explosive eras of American political history. For those who haven’t yet done so, isn’t it about time to start questioning whether or not this “protest folk” associated with the past can still be seen as an appropriate accompaniment to the struggles that are going on all around us today? Is this still the music of resistance, or is this just nostalgia for what resistance used to look like?

If you ask me, not only are the times a changin’, they have a change’d. With the rise of hip hop and punk as outlets for venting revolutionary opposition to government repression, the uninformed groupthink right-wing’s purges of any progressive-populist/anti-government sentiments from country music, and the general yuppifcation of properly termed folk music on the whole, the saliency of political folk has certainly withered significantly over time. Today more a vehicle for liberal condescension than a genuine means of agitation, political folk writ large has essentially been stripped of its communicative ability and today mostly serves as a means for political people who care more about lyrics than they do musical composition to chuckle or feel smug about themselves and their superior politics… that or to bring back fond, hallucinatory memories of the comfortable, bougie-pacifist revolution that never quite happened in the US.

Indeed, the only thing that makes me sadder than having to endure some middle-aged white guy or gal belting out a mediocre folk ditty written from the perspective of an imaginary Iraqi child, is the recognition that after he or she his done there will always be a handful of people lined up to buy their latest album so that they can possess what must be the audio equivalent of one those delightful “NO BLOOD FOR OIL” bumperstickers: Not art by any means, simply an affirmation of one’s own opinions.

But though the protest folk scene of today has by and large been reduced to little more than poorly-composed commodifications of the great revolution we’re all either waiting for or scared shitless of, after giving a listen to Bellingham & Philadelphia, a split between political folksters Robert Blake and Erik Petersen, I’ve found that I can’t pronounce the genre dead quite yet.

Following in the musical footsteps of acts like Against Me!, whose bread-and-butter is the blending of jaunty sing-along political punk songs with sensitive acoustic ballads, Erik Petersen is an acoustic-wielding punker from the city of brotherly love whose talent for painting anarcha-punk pictures of the ruins of urban collapse and suburban moral vacancy is almost unparalleled. For those not already hip to Petersen’s music, his opening six-track contribution to this split will no doubt represent a new hope for meaningful political folk music as this Philadelphia native has conjured up a brand of music which is simultaneously painfully earnest, engaging, politically conscious, and above all, played without a hint of nostalgia.

On the opening track, “Every Town Will Celebrate,” a gravel-voiced Petersen shouts out the foreboding story of Celebration, FL, a town built and operated by the Disney CorporationT. With an ominously perky refrain of “Every town will celebrate someday! / Waving sweatshop flags and grandé lattés / wearing culture on their backs / wearing spirit on the hats / one by one they’ll join the parade and celebrate!”, Petersen indignantly spins yarns about the quasi-fascist nature of American monoculture while his loose guitar strumming, punctuated phrasing, and occasional hooting exclamations (”Heeeey!”) keeps the music barreling forward. By contrast, “Olde Tyme Mem’ry” is a much slower and more sentimental dignified requiem for lost things (such as humanity, home, and good whiskey). “Boycott Me!” returns more to the indignant pissed-off folk of “Every Town” but is also Petersen’s most politically heavy-handed song, referencing the Fraternal Order of Police’s much publicized boycott of radical performers and artists because of their support for the political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Though all of Petersen’s tracks on Bellingham & Philadelphia are for the most part flawless, the two real stand-outs on the split are “Dirty Pennies,” a lengthy, emotive vignette that shamelessly pulls on the listener’s heartstrings to reveal a tale of social division of the costs of authoritarianism, and the percussion-backed “Liberty Unmasked” which plays as close to Against Me! as anything on this album. “Fare Well, Good Fellows” simply closes out Petersen’s half with talk of revolution and the need to find one’s own path through it.

But as all good things must come to an end, and as the vast majority of split LPs will inevitably have a good side and a not-so-good side, Robert Blake is predictably a rather disappointing come down from the halting refrains of my new folk hero Erik Petersen. While Bellingham’s Robert Blake offers six tracks of memorable refrains and imaginative lyricism, his offerings are at best hit-or-miss in terms of delivery and songwriting.

Blake’s real triumphs on Bellingham & Philadelphia are a poignant tribute to Petersen’s (and my) hometown on “Philadelphia,” and an immaculately performed gem titled “On The Coast.” Though the remainder of his tracks are undeniably musically proficient, consistently a notch above Petersen in terms of intricacy and accompaniment, too often they meander into either the laudation of protest activism into larger-than-life proportions or the unabashed spouting of new leftist political jargon. In contrast to Petersen, Blake’s politics are regularly shoved sloppily to the forefront, less personalized, and come off as regrettably generic within the context of a singer-songwriter folk delivery. What allows “Philadelphia” and “On The Coast” to shine so brightly is that rather than trying to tell a campfire story about a globalization summit or a lock-down along a street corner, Blake finds himself able to write just as passionately about the more mundane matters of people’s daily survival, which if you ask me will always be more important than even the most monumental, tide-turning protest.

Even still, if you’re feeling burned by the state of politically-minded folk music, I’d strongly advise you to give this split a serious listen before you throw out all your old Dylan albums in utter disgust. As uneven as this split is, I can guarantee it’ll be more than worth your time to hear a unique brand of folk music that will make you want to run out and smash the state. Protest folk may be on the decline, but it sure as heck ain’t finished.