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IVH: Martha / Please Don't Take Me Back [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-13

Tonight’s selections from Martha’s fourth album, 2022’s Please Don’t Take Me Back. Hailing from the village of Pity Me, Durham. A working class, mining town in Northern England.

Like most great power pop records, the appeal of Please Don’t Take Me Back is simple and universal. Most of all, Martha are here to have fun. They’re a band that thrives on the serotonin rush of an irresistible melody, an amped-up guitar riff, or a shouted gang vocal. The choruses of “Beat, Perpetual,” “Baby, Does Your Heart Sink?,” or the title track are so elementally catchy that anyone can sing them word-for-word by the end of the song. Yet, while Martha crafts their songs on sugary pop foundations, they also approach their music with a heart and maturity that is uncommon to the genre. “Hope Gets Harder” finds the band searching for a way to stay positive amidst ongoing overlapping crises, while “I Didn’t Come Here to Surrender” takes a defiant angle toward an uncertain future. It all culminates in a final moment of catharsis with the closer, “You Can’t Have a Good Time All of the Time,” a track that is possibly the most joyous and communal song about facing climate disaster ever written. Many bands mix the political with the personal, but few bands make both into hopeful collective experiences like Martha does, all while remaining one of the most consistent bands in indie punk. One could question how long the band can go without changing things up, but if they continue delivering records as good as Please Don’t Take Me Back, they could go on forever and nobody would complain. — Under the Radar

Please Don't Take Me Back

Baby, Does Your Heart Sink?

For a moment on their latest record, Martha almost give in to nostalgia. “Take me back to the old days/ Take me back to the glory days we had,” goes the chorus of the album’s title track, before the inevitable funny twist: “No wait, don’t do that, I was really fucking sad/ The old days were bad.” It’s a bold statement from one of the most consistent bands in power-pop, a genre that’s been thriving in 2022 but not always by looking to the future for inspiration – perhaps not surprising considering how the past few years have made us long for a false sense of normality. All this is subtext for the Durham four-piece, who are actually singing about the feelings that awaken when an old significant other starts calling – but with the complex self-awareness that’s haunted their crunchy, infectious songwriting over the past decade, it wouldn’t be a reach to look at it from more one angle. After all, their fourth album does take its name from that song: Please Don’t Take Me Back. In fact, there’s a lot of subtext that’s hard to ignore in Please Don’t Take Me Back, which distills the band’s best qualities into what might be their most satisfying outing yet. A strong social consciousness has always been part of Martha’s distinctly DIY ethos, but here they strike a tight balance between politically incisive lyrics and the kind of personal resonance and sugary presentation that needs to foreground them. Advance single ‘Hope Gets Harder’ and the title track were both accompanied by paragraph-length press statements about the state of their home country (“England: a uniquely fucking terrible idea”), while the album’s lyric sheet uses quotes by writer Alison Rumfitt, Stath Lets Flats character Vasos Charalambos, music critic and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, and others as insightful epigraphs. But in song, they’re succinct and beholden to the power of melody. On ‘Hope Gets Harder’, having clearly demonstrated why they hate this place, they wait until the final chorus to deliver the brilliant couplet, “Every day the hope gets harder/ England is a funeral parlour.” — Our Culture

Hope Gets Harder

So many records that get billed as depictions of young twenty-something malaise tend to focus on messy romance, sloppy indulgence, and regretful mistake-making so intensely that they often gloss over, or else mythologize, the daily circumstances that young adults share most closely: student loans, the dull shock of nine-to-five repetitiveness, economic uncertainty, or, as the band puts it, “precarious employment.” But if there’s one recurring tension on Blisters, it’s this very negotiation between work and fulfillment. As it turns out, the most radical thing about Martha’s latest album has nothing to do with the band’s identity politics but rather, their insistence upon turning their honest, deeply unsexy daily struggle with the financial realities of emerging adulthood into entertaining, relatable, high-stakes pop music. For the members of Martha, all of whom have maintained various day jobs as substitute teachers, tour bus drivers, college professors, and historical reenactors over the past few years, the ongoing difficulty in balancing artistic passion with adult responsibility became the very premise of the album. “I think the theme on the record of us struggling to manage our different lives is something we’ve all been feeling, and me especially,” Griffin explained. “That feeling of trying to balance a lot of things to be able to maintain a strong relationship with punk and feeling like a lost punk kid in a grown-up’s body.” “There’s the classic thing of having time but no money, or money but no time,” noted Stephens-Griffin, who is currently teaching Sociology at a University in a position that affords him little job security. “That’s kind of what the record is about in a way. It’s about trying to stay punk, keeping up your energy, and staying creative whilst also paying rent and whatnot.” — Brooklyn Magazine

FLAG // BURNER

Martha have always tried to shine a little light into the dark, and Please Don’t Take Me Back represents another attempt to do that. The title is a pretty heavy hint, but they’re keen not to fall into the trap of longing for the good old days (indeed, as the album’s title track reminds us, “The old days were bad”). Nathan clarifies the context: “We need to try and somehow envisage a future that is better and imagine and try to build the world we wanna see in the wreckage that we’re living in. It’s about not romanticising the past which we shouldn’t just accept as good enough, ‘cos the more things get worse, the more it feels like ‘oh if we could just go back to that’… But actually, no, since bloody forever, things haven’t been good enough and they need to get better.” Four albums is an atypically long lifespan for a DIY punk band, and the fact Martha are still here a decade after their first album is testament to their commitment to the cause. It can also make a band a little lonely when they outlive their peers, especially coming out of a period when everyone’s been forced indoors for so long. They once told us to Move To Durham And Never Leave, but it’s clear that their home city is a different place now. As Nathan says: “We’ve not really got a space in Durham any more. We’re very lucky we’ve got Pop Recs Ltd. in Sunderland. We were very much part of a scene when we started and now, locally, nationally, globally, whatever... For me, I feel a bit more disconnected just because of how long we’ve been quiet. Three years is a long time for people in bands – it’s the entire life of some bands – so I want this tour to be a chance to reconnect and see what’s going on everywhere.” — NARC

Beat Perpetual



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