Former Husker Du drummer and co-songwriter Grant Hart has taken some unusual routes since the demise of that seminal American power-pop trio. However, a sprawling 20-track double album based on John Milton’s epic 1667 10-volume poem Paradise Lost is amongst the strangest and most ambitious musical projects ever undertaken outside the confines of a university music department.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about The Argument is the fact that for an album about “man’s first disobedience… the loss of Eden” and Satan’s fall, much of it doesn’t actually sound all that weird. Tracks like ‘Morningstar’, ‘Run For The Wilderness’ and ‘Glorious’ betray Hart’s punk-pop roots. The sneering, sinuous swing of ‘Sin’ has echoes of The Doors’ ‘Love Street’, ‘It Isn’t Love’ glams things up like Ziggy, and ‘Under The Apple Tree’ has a pre-war George Formby feel, while the rootsy ‘Letting Me Out’ could be an out-take from Mermaid Avenue, the Billy Bragg/Wilco Woody Guthrie homage.
Elsewhere, it gets a little more dramatic with the galloping ‘I Am Death’, the fairground-stall-wurlitzer vibe of ‘Shine, Shine, Shine’, the whimsical ‘If We Have The Will’ and the soaring pop opera of ‘Awake, Arise’. But if you didn’t know the lyrics were based around a 350-year-old, 10,000-line poem about the mythical battle between heaven’s minions and the fallen angels, you might just think the Minnesota native had developed a taste for the kind of theatrical pop Jacques Brel revelled in.
Hart doesn’t quote Milton directly, but on tracks like ‘I Will Never See My Home’, ‘Is The Sky The Limit?’ and ‘For Those Too High Aspiring’, he gets across all the drama and torment the 17th Century poet could have wished for. The fact that Hart has created something so palatable from such stilted, albeit brilliant, source material is an achievement in itself.