Brendan Kelly and the Wandering Birds – Keep Walkin’ Pal

While so many of his labelmates have gone on to have their fifteen minutes of fame (Rise Against, Against Me!, Alkaline Trio), Brendan Kelly really has come to terms with the fact that he’s never going to be famous (he’s had a few blog posts on the topic).  And much like other dedicated life-long punkers having reached this mid-life realization (Swingin’ Utters’ being another that comes to mind), he’s a better musician for it.  Don’t get me wrong, Kelly’s primary band, The Lawrence Arms, is well regarded within the scraps remaining of today’s punk scene (it seems to be shrinking at an alarming rate), but it never reached beyond the limits of its target niche.  

So rather than allowing hyping The Lawrence Arms to totally consume him, Kelly is comfortable enough with his career to take extended breaks between releases and let his creativity run free without expectation.  To date he has had two primary side project, The Falcon and Brendan Kelly and the Wandering Birds (he also has some solo acoustic stuff under his solo name, but it seems reserved for covers and splits).  The primary distinction between these two are loosely that the former is faster, rougher, and punker, while the latter is darker, gruffer, and less predictable.  Kelly divides his attention between the three projects like a pendulum that changes course every few years with the current swing freshly moving from The Falcon to the Wandering Birds for his second full length, Keep Walkin’ Pal.

Now, you have to understand that Brendan Kelly fans absolutely coveted the first Wandering Birds album.  It was a dark, brooding trip into Kelly’s mind (which seems to have become increasingly twisted with age), enhanced by his unconventional, and at times cryptic and revealing expression of his thoughts.  So the prospect of a new album was exciting to say the least. But Keep Walkin’ Pal was released quietly, and really only announced within the month of its release.  Why? Well, aside from the label, Red Scare Industries, being run out of Tobias Jeg’s apartment with limited resources (thanks for all you do Toby!), it may have been that Kelly cautiously understood that Keep Walkin’ Pal takes more risks and is outright weirder than anything else in his career.  In other words, avoid the hype machine, and see how the fans react.

Keep Walkin’ Pal is a weird but timely album that took a couple of listens for me to fall into.  I had to embrace altering my mental schema of Kelly’s musicianship and just accept the strange twist therein.  That being said, the album opens with business as usual as Kelly’s loose, sloppy vocals stumble along in a grainy acoustic haze.  Kelly slurs and grumbles like a tipsy streetwise poet as he describes the ultimate memorial for a forgotten, washed up club goer, laid to rest “where the concrete meets the sky, so all those pretty girls can see right where I lie,” where they “dip their fingers in the wet cement.”  The opener evolves along with odd, deviant imagery like “baby I’m an astronaut, and you’re my Enterprise, gonna see what I can do, when I get inside,” and it makes you wonder, just what thoughts occupy Kelly’s mind when he’s sitting alone at a dingy dive on a slow Thursday night.  But that’s about it for normal – or as normal as Kelly’s mind allows.

From here on out Keep Walkin’ Pal steps back a few decades for inspiration.  As unlikely as it seems, Kelly has fallen in love with the 80’s.  But not the neon spandex of former pop idols. No, this is the dark corner of that era that spawned the synthy, suspenseful soundtracks of Silence of the Lambs and Pet Cemetery.  I have a feeling that Kelly is a fan of the heavily inspired 80’s Netflix hit Stranger Things, as many of these notes feel as if mixed and engineered in the same studio. Tracks like “Black Cat Boy” and “The Lies” pulse and thump without apology, with bassy beats and thin-strung notes weaving a synthy lattice around Kelly’s otherwise punkish riffs and mid-tempo drum beats.  “Up In Them Guts” feeds Kelly’s deviant imagery, with lyrics that aren’t shy to get a little dirty, messy and weird. Meanwhile, “I’m The Man” is a slow, synth driven outro that revisits the album’s opening chorus, but with pulsing soundboard emissions and background vocals chanting “superman” in a funky style. The verse repeats during the prolonged finale amidst the cryptic, clandestine line, “sitting alone at the bottom of the TV screen, I’m the man, I got a bottle of Mr. Clean.”  It’s enough to send shivers up your spine as you connect the dots.

Keep Walkin’ Pal is highly experimental for Kelly, and marks the first time he’s cleanly broken from what might be considered his career conventions.  And for the most part, it works – well. My only complaint is that after falling in love with Stranger Things and dark, synth driven moods, I almost wish Kelly had ventured even further down the rabbit hole.  Given that the album is obviously experimental in nature, it lacks a certain cohesion that goes with trying a few new things at once. “Boardin’ USA” is a smart critique of waterboarding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, but stylistically sticks out like a sore thumb in its upbeat 50’s surf-scene vibes.  “Bottle and Tray,” a personal favourite, feels more at home on the band’s previous album, as the synth elements are missing from all but the final moments of the track. Regardless, Keep Walkin’ Pal is an unexpected treat that further wets the appetite for Kelly’s future vision of Brendan Kelly and the Wandering Birds.