Please Don’t Take Me Back
Album by Martha
Released 28 October 2022
Power Pop
Label – Specialist Subject
Rating – 6/10
Martha are frightened, damn frightened. But they’re juggling fright with solidarity.
–
One accent is shared among the multiple singers of Martha. A pick ‘n’ mix of singers and players, with no through-and-through frontperson, the pop-punk-power-pop quartet has opened itself back up to its County Durham homeland, following the pandemic, during which we all found ourselves fixed to our respective enclosures. Please Don’t Take Me Back is Martha’s pandemic / post-pandemic album.
Whilst venturing and reprinting concrete floors with shoes, Martha’s return typifies the modern north, rekindling the old, clenched fist with a Gen X-onward, teary exuberance, like the paramount of an emo song. With emo in mind, now would be a good time to mention that the band is actually from a village called “Pity Me”.
And pity them we might, or at least empathise via our own perplexities, our own behind-closed-doors darkness. But despite the emo lines of Total Cancellation of the Future – truly stuck inside, albeit passing further north to beget vocals lovingly reminiscent of Scott Hutchinson – Please Don’t Take Me Back trades mopes with arms linked in celebration, triumphing on I Didn’t Come Here to Surrender with a rarely positive song title, and an eventual group harmony that applauds togetherness.
A similar warrior’s refrain, a University Tower-stretching group chant, attempts to swat away the faux wildness of Flag Burner’s dialled-up, arm-wailing performances. But why wallow when Baby, Does Your Heart Sink wants nothing but to lift you up? We’ve got a concert-concluding anthem on our hands; prolonged guitar solos over the most recognisable singalongs over the most recognisable chord progressions, as uproarious as it is contemptuously tried.
Detonations of multi-layered distortion flood into the melancholy of You Can’t Have a Good Time All of the Time, draining delicacy with Weezer roars and Housemartins northern-ness, before a final, seldom-seen synth patch channels the outro, a definitive victory for producer Phil Booth. Rarely is power pop as proud as it appears on Beat, Perpetual, like a ribbon-cutting, or fireworks at the Olympic Games, further contrasting the loneliness of isolation.
However, dissolution may still obfuscate cheery grins, and no such grin was ever evident on Hope Gets Harder – with that title, a “no shit” is in order. A lowly cousin to Beat, Perpetual, slightly more drunken, feeling the blues, fascinated by its own blues, theatrical yelps and acidic, red oil guitars to attempt psychiatric ying-yang – prosperity and hopelessness – but dredge prevails.
Irreversible Motion is a pneuma altered by isolation, like the Netflix drama we forced ourselves to watch during lockdown. Real people motion into unreal tides, drawing to others with friendly power pop chord progressions, another scream for solidarity. Funky guitars flickers surround the looseness of the title track, as if James Brown is ready to turn around to tell Martha to tighten up. Easy-goingness acts as a shield for the bleaker, cigarette-smoking form of nostalgia, weather-beaten and sick-to-death of turning the calendar over.
A scatterbrain of mixed, clashing thoughts, as well as a fight for survival, Please Don’t Take Me Back epitomises the struggle of our new normal, whilst revisiting seemingly ancient luxuries, and musically filtering our responses with up-and-down results, but humanist, nonetheless. Its deterrent is its do-all dizziness; its safety net is a 2020s staple: self-awareness.
Best track – I Didn’t Come Here to Surrender.
Weakest track – Flag Burner.
Rating – 6 out of 10
PEANUTBUTTERPOPE 