Hi there. I have some shocking news for you. You ready? Hogarth was wrong. HOGARTH. WAS. MOTHERFUCKIN’. WRONG. Yup. You heard right. Hogarth, with his celebrated piece of anti-gin propaganda, Gin Lane, was utterly wrong. (He was, however, right when it came to its companion piece, the pro-beer Beer Street, but that’s not really relevant here. I’m all about the Hogarthian WRONG). Gin, far from being a terrible scourge on health and society, is in fact a rather lovely scourge on health and society. Also, nobody in Gin Lane is wearing a Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing T-shirt. Which they really should be. For “gin”, as The Men tell us on their new single, “is the tonic to cure all your woes”.
Things take a more serious (though equally rockin’) turn on “Third Class Coffin,” which does a rather neat trick (which The Men are becoming quite adept at these days) of actually using the potential of steampunk as a musical genre to do what so much literary and subcultural steampunk doesn’t bother to (usually because it’s too busy unironically celebrating the British Empire, which is a bit cock, really- obviously, as with most things, there are exceptions), which is to look at the present through the eyes of the past and hold a mirror up to society. Or, to put it in a snappier and less up-my-own-arse sort of way, it’s a song about how the poor were treated like shit back in the day (in this instance by being denied a proper send-off). As they are now. Which is where the “punk” comes in. It’s chunky, it’s angry, and it’s quite possibly one of the best songs they’ve done thus far. “I’m a third class citizen even when I’m dead” chants Andy Heintz, and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the only thing really separating street-level Victorian squalor from the Tory present is the size of the hats.
-Justin Farrington-
