Brendan Kelly and the Wandering Birds – I’d Rather Die Than Live Forever

The effects of children and middle-age on the hard-rocking psyche are among the great curiosities of punk. In 2012, men with sagging earlobes and burst capillaries listlessly patrol the malls and Disneyland. They shush teenagers in movie theaters and bend wide arcs on the sidewalk to avoid skateboarders. Enter Brendan Kelly, angry old man of punk.

His new album – solo with accompaniment? Soloesque? – opens with the cheerfully cruel “Suffer the Children, Come Unto Me,” in which a flattering line directed at a girl in a bar quickly gives way to dark and perverted introspection on the learned heartlessness of sexual predation. Not the illegal kind – criminals of that kind become the target of the narrator’s wrath elsewhere on the album – rather, the kind inspired by too many nights in the dens of iniquity that set the stage for several of the album’s spine-tingling tracks.

The misanthropy that permeates the I’d Rather Die Than Live Forever is a refreshingly brutal narration of the kind of life other artists are often, perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation, tempted to render with sterile romanticism. Undergirding the subject matter is a rock sensibility conventional by self-dubbed “conceptual album” standards that makes the contrast all the more powerful. The epithet at the end of “Suffer the Children” and the build-up to the drop of “Dance of the Doomed” are as poignant musical moments as Kelly has ever taken part in.

Where the offense fails and gives way to introspection the song-craft is a little thinner, and tracks like “Ramblin’ Revisited” are largely wasted opportunities, opportunities really only available on conceptual albums put together by soloist offshoots from already-popular groups. (In punk this is a surprisingly sizeable population) Elsewhere, tracks like “American Vagina” partially impress by demonstrating Kelly’s unflinching command of his voice, without really taking off. The bold exposition that permeates “Dance of the Doomed” and “Latenightelasticbags” has elements of Tom Waits’ grungy sexuality that, if Kellycan get a band and enough studio time for more than one album every three years, will put him in the annals of the genre.

After the final chorus of “Covered in Flies” the album ends with a whimper in “The Thud And The Echo,” in which the piece’s main character seems to apologize for what was just heard. However the song seems largely unsuitable for touring and, given that this is Kelly’s stated vehicle for the album its likely that its best songs will land solidly in the punk lore, reassuring its listeners and Kelly’s growing legion of fans that he is at the helm of punk’s next chapter.