Think music and politics don’t mix? Listen to this, and then decide.
“I suppose this could be considered my protest album” is how Bedford artist Luke Tuchscherer describes “Living Through History” on the blurb on the back of the LP. Certainly, from the first lines of the opening title track:
“Sirens scream through the city
People under siege
Are we fighting an enemy
Too big to defeat?”
Through to the album’s signing off with a recording of a 1919 speech by Lenin denouncing workers’ oppression at the hands of the capitalists, there’s no doubt that impassioned dissent is a major motor on this album. Tuchscherer mainly rails against social and economic injustice and exploitation, but also political hypocrisy and (sadly, in much more modern times than Lenin) the ongoing rise of the far right comes in for a hammering as well.
But no matter how hard-hitting and thoughtful Luke Tuchscherer’s lyrics are (more on that later), not even as timely an album as “Living Through History” can avoid the fact that the virtual shelf-life of an album almost always hinges much more on the quality of the songs, production and vocal performance than the importance of its ‘messages’. All to the good, then, that “Living Through History” has than enough traction in all three of those areas to instantly remove any risk of the album losing its musical relevance, let alone its unquestioned political punch.
How so? Well, from first listen, any album that starts off with a title track highly reminiscent of the (also very politically charged and highly recommended) first Tom Robinson Band album – “Power in the Darkness” (1978) – is already onto a good thing. “Living Through History” is mostly tense, high tempo, hard-edged indy rock, but just like “Power in the Darkness,” too, there’s a deftness and compactness in the arrangements – mid-song solo basslines or exposed vocals here, a swirl of electric organ there – that suggests it’s been anything but underthought or lazily produced.
From the outside, you can’t tell if this is due to the influence of longsanding collaborator Dave Banks or if it is a consequence of Tuchscherer’s hefty and impressively diverse musical rap sheet – this is his sixth solo album (and before that he was a part of a band, the Whybirds) after all, and all of them pull in very different directions (The instrumentation of his previous album, “Widows and Orphans” was based around a ‘cello, double bass and piano, all conspicious by their absence here).. But even if “Living Through History” mostly cracks along at a stunning, high-energy pace on its own volition, when it comes to wringing those few extra revs out of the motor to give it some extra welly, it feels like whoever’s responsible knows every trick in the book.
Lyrically, too, Tuchscherer doesn’t just deliver the goods on injustice in accessible, down-to-earth language, but he also turns the spotlight inwards, to some stunningly bleak moments of introspection and doubt. If this is a protest album, tracks like ‘Walls Come Tumbling’ show Tuchscherer realises, too – and this is a huge strength to “Living Through History” – that commitment doesn’t always hold the line, and everybody can have a crisis. In fact, with a finely cascading chorus, a much more stately pace and Tuchscherer’s slightly mournful-sounding voice, ‘Walls Come Tumbling’ is a real high point of the album, maybe even more so than some of the political numbers.
“Walls come tumbling, come tumbling down
Give me something, anything, to stop the sound
My god, it’s over now
I put my faith into a beautiful lie.”
He’s also able to pack a fine chorus punchline in the same vein on another standout song, ‘Most Days’. Again, this is where the politics takes a step back, and Tuchscherer points at the chinks in his – and everybody’s – mental armour.
“Most days I’ve got my head on straight
Most days, I can let things slide
Most days, I can navigate
Most days I feel alive,” he sings in the chorus before adding the devastating payoff – “But this ain’t most days.”
What “Living Through History” lacks, perhaps, is specific storylines or narratives rather than a shade too many sweeping generalisations of the “workers’ rights are human rights” variety. The only point where we get a lot (perhaps too many?) of the personal references are all crammed onto the last track of all, ‘Goodbye Bergen St.’, where Tuchscherer builds a song out of some memories of his time in New York, where most of the album actually was written. But as with the best protest albums, fortunately “Living Through History” isn’t in any way mere handwringing over the fact that it feels like a lot of the world is currently going to crap, it also transmits the message that there is something to be done about it, very much in the here and now. As Tuchschere puts it in the last political song of the album – and its placing is surely intentional – ‘This World’s Worth Saving’.
“Sometimes I wish there was a god
To lead us from the dark
But the power lies in us
All we need’s a spark.”
Given the intense, vivid drive that characterises all of the songs on “Living Through History”, hopefully that’s a message that won’t be forgotten in a hurry.
