‘Which way does the spiral spin, inside out or outside in? It’s a choice and it’s always been…, Feast and famine back-to-back’ (Spiral)

Which way indeed.  This is a question that fundamentally pervades our current predicament.  Society increasingly untethered, militarised conflict escalating, the earth’s vital signs alarmingly erratic, and institutionalised inequality breeding a sense of hopelessness that change can ever occur.  Our hearts hope that such volatility could yet be a harbinger for positive change, yet our heads tell us that things are only likely to get much worse, as the spiral spins out of control, eating itself in a frenzy of exploitation and extraction.

New York’s Straw Man Army are back.  Earthworks is the duo’s third album, following on from 2020’s Age Of Exile and 2022’s SOS.  The stripped back, anarcho-punk backbone to their endeavours remains firmly in place, but each release has seen an incrementally more expansive palette brought to bear, without compromising the strident immediacy of their song writing.  Leanly structured, tightly executed, the underlying richness is revealed in the subtle detailing.

Spryly bouncy bass lines and tautly crisp drumming are intricately interwoven.  In contrast to this rhythmic density, there is a spartan directness to the brightly angular, enticingly melodic guitar.  The insistent, cleanly enunciated vocals unveil a sardonically eloquent, poetically rhythmic exploration of the linkage between neoliberal economics, colonial legacies, and the environmental decimation of our planet.

The urgent Look Alive sets the scene perfectly, calling out our own lethargy in the face of a world unravelling (‘Prisoners of comfort, we dig our heels, forever stuck!’).  This theme is reinforced on the delicately, slow burn Rope Burn (‘In the country that can do no wrong, you’ll go along…’), and interspersed with the rollicking vitriol of Spiral (‘Is this all that’s left for us these days? Apathy and rage!’).

Urban dispossession forms the focal point for the roiling Staring At The Sun (‘What does it take to get locked away? Being poor in a public place’) and our disintegrating sense of community on the juddering Mass Production Of Loneliness (‘Our lives are mass produced, To break the link from you to me’).  Meanwhile, the roots of our continued refusal to engage with the looming environmental catastrophe are probed throughout the album and delineated with particular clarity on the forcefully compelling Extinction Burst (‘Chasing our extinction and we wonder why?’).