Background
RENT STRIKE is John Warmb, with some assistance from others on things like drums and some tasteful accordion. If you couldn’t tell, the name is a call to action. Even as unfamiliar with the artist and the entire genre of folk punk as I am, I could have made an educated guess that it’d be a hotbed of leftist ideals. Any good DIY music should be.
Track by Track Thoughts
The album starts off with “I: Snowdrop,” which is an amazing opener. It’s got this waxing and waning strength of attack on the guitar, which gives you the sense that this is going to be a project driven by emotion and urges. You’re subtly poisoned by the growing disgust and pain and, more than anything, honesty in his voice as he goes on. When he says “This is the end, this is goodbye,” you’re like, hell yeah it is! Whatever is over, you know it needs to be, for one reason or another.
The tension and the feelings grow, and all of a sudden, this riff is spontaneously formed from the frustration that blossoms into “II: The Road Giveth…” I’m a major sucker for songs that seamlessly transition into each other, especially when they don’t need each other to stand on their own, and this is a perfect example of that. This is where we start to get into more concrete issues, with lines like “I’ll always be angry, I’ll never be sober,” and “I’m gonna keep going, my liver’s just fine, thanks” giving you a sense of what some of the album’s frustration is coming from in the first place. The song is saying how there’s more than one way to live a life right, and it doesn’t have to be long or clean to be that. The fact that it sounds like a drinking song can’t possibly be a coincidence. It’s the essence of folk: it could easily be something passed down from sot to sot at the tavern across generations, an anthem for those that choose to walk the primrose path.
“III: Family Graveyard” sounds more like what I expected from “folk punk” as an outsider. It’s got some really evocative imagery, purely poetic at times. Strong enough to make you feel like these memories might have been yours too, in some past life or before you killed some of your brain cells. The drums are muted but active and in double time. There’s banjo too, just as muted but still giving you the folksy feeling it always does. It’s dark but not snotty dark like a lot of punk rock is, it’s existentially dark. It’s a song about coming to the realization that God isn’t there for you and you’re going to end up in the ground too. You really start to intellectualize the different layers of instrumentation on the album here; there’s a lot of different voices and pieces that all tastefully enter and exit where they’re most appropriate. I’m also noticing for the first time that some of the enunciation is pretty strong and over the top, which normally is a turn-off for me but I think it’s just so damn earnest here that I can’t hate it.
Next is “IV: Me, Myself & the Eye,” which starts off sounding like it’s gonna be the hardest metal drop of all time with sparse foreboding guitar and tom-forward drums, but instead you get hit with one of the most painful-sounding vocal affects you can imagine, just adding to the uneasiness. This is what the witch sounds like as you burn her at the stake; this is what your id would sound like as you resist your basest instincts; this is venom personified. The lyrics are pure lashing out, at everything and everyone in the world. It’s someone who’s been hit and burned too many times before realizing that it’s time to just leave it all and go it alone from here on out. The bluegrass-y guitar line that comes in is a welcome breath of normalcy that ushers in what feels like a lot more of a “normal” song in the back half, but the drums still keep you just barely on edge, and then the original weirdness is reprised on the way out. Put this at the very end of your Halloween playlist, for when you want everyone to leave scared.
“V: Fair Trade Death March” is definitely the easiest casual listen of the bunch so far. The concept of walking through the beauty of the world and having it radicalize you to join forces with Mother Nature and march upon industrialization itself with destruction in your heart is really powerful, and it’s hard to hear this and not want to take up arms yourself in whatever way you can. The last verse kinda sounds like Louis Armstrong on helium, but I still respect the effort put in to give the words gravitas.
My favorite song on the whole album is probably “VI: Don’t Let Love Bog You Down.” It’s not abrasive at all sonically and sounds great. Lyrically, it’s (I think) a super dark ode to wallowing in addiction with the one you love. That’s a contrast I can always get behind. I could be reading into it too far, but I don’t think so. I would love to hear other interpretations, though, or if you can’t see it that way. I think what’s really interesting about this song, and this album as a whole, is that you can put a lot of different situations over it and find a fit somewhere. Maybe you see this as choosing love over something else, something more traditionally “good,” or maybe you see it as being infatuated with something that hurts you and the lyrics are personifying that thing as the “lady.” It all works if you want it to, and it’s not easy to write a song so well that you can do that to it.
“VII:” sounds like an interlude to start with, with soft far-off piano and vocals, but it has such an amazing switch-up in the last verse. You realize with some horror that this song from the start has been about dying and being fully aware of the process, losing that essence of what makes you you and not knowing what comes next. It’s beautifully written and executed.
“VIII: Shadow&Gloom” starts off sounding like “Save Tonight” by Eagle-Eye Cherry got put into a food processor with some vinegar, but it quickly turns into an anxiety anthem with a bouncy rhythm and a sense that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. And that’s okay. It bounces from a call for “mother” to being really down on literally everything to ending back on that same call. It feels like withdrawal put to music. It’s intense, there’s a contradictory feeling from the way the music interacts with the vocals, there’s vivid descriptors of feelings like cold sweats and struggling to breathe and the pain of not being able to supplement your natural dopamine (which has long been exhausted) or sleep or stay still or anything but dwell on the titular shadow and gloom.
We end on IX of IX, of course. I feel like if “IX: To the West!!” was just a little bit cleaner and more radio-friendly vocally, it could be a real sad-singalong anthem on the level of “Welcome to the Black Parade” (except “IX: To the West!!” is actually good). It even has that triumphant back-half marching cadence with the group shouts and everything. It’s seemingly pretty clearly about dying again, but this time making some semblance of peace with it. Not a perfect peace, not even close to a total acceptance, but some sort of coming-to-terms has happened between where we started and now. It’s gonna happen, and it’s not going to be pretty, and it’s not gonna be some pearly gates love-fest on the other side, but it’s gonna happen, and we’re gonna go out the right way. Loud and proud. Into the West.
Final Thoughts
The album’s notes on Bandcamp start with a sentence, lifted from the Lord of the Rings’ foreword, that seems like it perfectly describes the flow of this project: “This tale grew in the telling.” It starts off relatively small and almost whiny (not in a bad way, in a real way), and becomes something so much bigger by the end. What might have started as a small breakup or a bad day ends up being some real philosophical meditations and looks upon life, and the end of life, and what we’re to do with it during the in between. It’s a really moving work, and it really merits being heard in full and digested properly. Luckily for us, it’s name-your-price, so you don’t have any reason not to.
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This post was made possible by crabaret, a Patreon member who suggested the album for a listen and a review. DogfishCrus doesn’t serve ads, so the support of members on Patreon and merch sales are the only ways I can offset the financial and time costs of running the site. Thank you for your support!