The Stanfields – Death and Taxes

Part of the stated intent of The Stanfields’ second album, Death & Taxes, is to “be more frank about it” when it comes to the values of social justice and workers’ rights they’ve been talking about since bursting onto the scene in 2008. That they have certainly accomplished on their more serious sophomore offering.There’s a lot going on in this album, not always to a successful end, but with a depth and breadth of ideas not often come by on a work of Death & Taxes length.

The album opens with “Jack of All Trades,” a dark and direct commentary on working-class struggles to make ends meet. Drawing on imagery from modern-day and 20th-century labor struggles the band’s politics come together to a tune drawing heavily on Irish Bostonian style. Next, “Run on the Banks” conjures a war veteran whose son was murdered at home, and the band’s ideas begin to layer. There are a lot of references to look up in this album, a lot of history playing out in the service of a 21st-century Canadian punk zeitgeist.

Yet even the best and most serious moments on the album suffer from translation issues: A piece ostensibly set in 1775 sung with a John Mellencamp Midwestern-boy vocabulary is the most egregious, though “The Boston States” survives as one of the album’s strongest on its production value. The eponymous track is one of the best tunes, but its attempt to say something about the Hagakure of the modern fiscal psychopath doesn’t quite build to anything.

Many of the tracks on Death & Taxes suffer from the distance between the intelligent things The Stanfields have to say and their insistence on projecting the country vibe. As such, while tunes about gangsters and poverty stick due to the band’s talent in composing a piece the lyricism can come off hokey and, at times, irrelevant.

One of the maintenance costs of the “working-class punk” label seems to be a self-imposed moratorium on the polysyllabic when it comes to narrating a story from a day-laborer frame of mind. The Boston crowd does this, the Alberta crowd does this, and The Stanfields are doing it. Much of this album would be strengthened by an understanding that an uneducated person is not necessarily a yokel.

At its best this album has as grim and gritty a story about labor and poverty in the modern era as anything in your Lagwagon or Rise Against collection, tonally different but in the same rhetorical vein. The Stanfields’ tunes ring with the stronger Irish operators on the scene today. It is at times nakedly self-conscious about its roots and less than subtle in its attempt to appeal to a certain audience. Those are times that future records can do without.