Celtic Beat magazine Review:
The Bible Code Sundays:Ghosts
of Our Past
Sometimes more truths are told from afar than in the middle of
it all. London based The
Bible Code Sundays so well sum up American
Irish History, and legend that I would have nominated
them the Irish
end of AmeriCelt supreme! Their songs are full of the legends:
Whitey,
Hell's Kitchen, townies and wiseguys, and two songs that sum up what
it is in memory to be Irish AND American: "Honour Of The Gael " and
"Dixieland." All this in a pulsating Mulligan stew of traditional
instrumentals with thundering Rock percussion.
"Dixieland" is a Dixieland masterpiece that tells it like it
is,
of the bloody baptism of fire that that gave Irish Catholic Famine
and as well in my ancestry
Scots Abolitionist) immigrants the first
powerful claim to their Americanism(as this did
for several
ethnicities and in all the wars hence,as in the refrain "we
spilled
our blood on the battlefield.......we're all Americans").In a war
where the leaders of the winning side then betrayed their own
revolution, ultimately, after "Reconstruction" not inflicting the
victor's perogative upon defeated southern planters as they had on
Mexico and, most unjusitifiably, on numerous Native nations. And where
a
President of the United States, Andrew Johnson,who should never have
been Vice President, betrayed
the Fenians,and his kind: Woodrow
Wilson,George Wallace, Mike Huckabee, Bob Barr,
Lyndon Johnson,George
W. Bush, have been betraying this country ever since!. Nonetheless,
in
spite of this, there was a partial victory, that of Reason over Faith,
of entrepreneurship and "greed" over feudalism and slavery, that made
the United States of America what it was at it's height(and a stature
than could be regained if we can once again defeat the forces of
faith, fraud, and treason), despite all of the internal betrayals of
it's
ideals. This song is also about the 20th Maine and Joshua Chamberlain,
the hero of Gettysburg, who
was also one of the first professors in Maine
to bring Darwin to America. Coincidence? I think
not!
"Better Man Than Me" is about turning the other cheek to
discrimination
and oppression. It is a counterpoint to "Honour of The Gael."
For my money I favor the
"Chicago Style" of dealing with the enemies
of liberty as discussed by
Sean Connery in The Untouchables. "Honour
of the Gael" starts out grimly, as the coffin
ships leave Ireland,and
surges triumphantly, albeit tarnished and wounded, in the brutal
and
brave new world of late 20th and early 21st century Charlestown,
Massachusetts. The rough times and tough young men of New York are
also grandly sung with matching instrumentals in "McBratney From The
Kitchen."
I thought of the description of the youth of Gail Wynand in
The Fountainhead. And of
course to many these songs would conjure up Gangs of New York.
If anyone is offended by this review make
the most of it! There
was an era in Great Britain(and before independence in what is
now the
Republic of Ireland) when such songs would have earned The Bible Code
Sundays a trip to the brig! But no doubt had they lived then they
would have spoken truth to power.
Interspersed
here are powerful percussive instrumentals such as
"Plunkster" and
humor as in "Mary of the Northolt Road."
Focused, and to the point, The Bible Code Sundays teach a
powerful history lesson,
from distant Britain and Ireland no less! A
history lesson that is lost
on so many Celtic Americans and Irish
Americans-caught between Pat Buchanan and Chuck
Norris on one side and
Barney Frank and Michael Moore on the other (all who may have
more in
common than I wish to dwell upon at any length, on pain of being
nauseated, these are two ends of a sandwich no one who is rational
wants to be the filling of). From London this is a CeltRock band that
reminds
us again that those who do not remember history are bound to repeat it!
>AK
AS AN INDEPENDENT RELEASE IN THE UK 'GHOSTS OF OUR PAST' WAS VOTED '2006 ALBUM OF THE
YEAR' ON BOSTON BASED IRISH PUNK ROCK WEBSITE 'SHITE'N'ONIONS'!!!!