Just when you thought anger, frustration, despair and hopelessness were things of the past, along come Paranoid Visions, with their first new material since 1992, to shake us all out of our complacency.
Keeping the spirit of ‘77 alive for, gasp, a quarter of a century now, Dublin’s punk survivors haven’t lost any of their bite and bile; 40 Shades Of Gangreen exposes the underbelly of the Celtic Tiger with a blistering collection of anti-establishment polemic. The title-track amounts to a re-writing of the proclamation of the Republic and a damning indictment of modern-day Ireland. “I feel sadness for the heroes who laid down their lives for this,” they howl over a martial beat and a guitar noodling the melody of the national anthem.
It certainly paints a bleak picture of this country which is described as “The arsehole of Amerikkka, the playground of the Brits/Where the lines of junkies crawl to get a fix.” Nothing escapes their radar including our “sham neutrality” and the “filthy rich” while they roundly condemn “the arrogance and greed of the plastic Paddies who can barely speak our language as they sow their bogus seeds.”
With buzzsaw riffs and cracking snare, the Cramps-like ‘9 Months To The Disco’ has a go at the deadbeat dads who shirk their parental responsibility, while elsewhere ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Revolution’ takes aim at the modern day punk pretenders – the “fucking copycats” and contains one of the best lines: “rock and roll revolution, we don’t need this noise pollution.”
Uncompromising and apocalyptic Paranoid Visions take no prisoners. You have to admire their dogged adherance to the punk aesthetic. Just don’t expect to hear this on daytime radio or at D4 dinner parties.