As the curtain falls on Act 1 of this farcical dramedy called 2022, Straw Man Army’s “SOS” already feels like the album of the year — yes, in a boring, music-crit-praise-language kind of way, but more significantly, in the steely, zeitgeist-inside-a-clenched-fist kind of way. This New York punk duo stares directly into the hybrid catastrophes piling up on the horizon and does not blink.
“Humankind can be hard to find,” goes the album’s opening line, cymbals and guitars flickering in a straight line as the talk-sung narration proceeds to explain how “species that carry a spiritual debt are hunched by the weight of those of their kind.” Those lyrics read like poetry, but they sound like a nod to the crushing alienation generated by humanity’s various existential crises: the intensification of climate change, the perpetual threat of nuclear war, the brutal legacies of colonialism, the unsustainable dominance of capitalism and more. Humankind’s biggest problem is itself, and the only solution we’ve managed to dream up so far is to cover our eyes.
But from that point forward, Straw Man Army — Owen Deutsch and Sean Fentress — refuses to fume, panic, scowl or proselytize. Instead, the band assesses the stakes, confronting the overwhelming cruelty of the world with a sound that’s deliberate, humane and very much its own. Imagine the brittle jangle of post-punk conjoined with the martial rat-a-tat of anarcho punk, but played with the sensitivity, intimacy and awareness of jazz, and you might be getting close.
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At times, the blunt-force lucidity of the band’s lyricism threatens to blot out any neighboring sounds — but not on “State of the Art,” a standout track about the speed-of-life distortions we all experience in the hyperconnectivity of the digital age. “Speeds exceed, keep up with the times,” they sing in syncopated deadpan. “Wind whips our face up here, the heights are sublime/ Don’t rip the scales from my eyes, I don’t want to die.” As the song’s tempo repeatedly surges and decelerates, you can hear the duo losing and reclaiming control over their temporal existence until the entire song feels like it’s breathing.
That’s important, because this music isn’t about despair. It’s about life. It’s about taking a hard look into a dark future and deciding how we might better protect each other, right now and tomorrow. (For starters, Straw Man Army is donating all profits from “SOS” to the prison abolition group Roots Unbound’s commissary fund.)
And just in case the songs hadn’t already made it bracingly clear, there’s a mission statement printed on the album’s insert confirming that Straw Man Army’s “SOS is not a distress signal” — rather, it’s “an exclamation, a sudden outburst bearing witness to an ongoing crisis of scale,” they write. “For those of us born after ‘the end of history,’ it’s no easy task figuring out where we stand. And here we are, trying to get a good look at it.”
They sound like they’ve found the truth. To see what they see, you have to listen.
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