The Climate Stripes - Debut (2022)

 Beautifully mastered by Simon Gibson at Abbey Road, DEBUT employs a complex variety of blues & rock riffs and thought-provoking lyrics in celebration of the human experience.

At one end of the pentatonic scale, The Road and Come Home are simply innocent love songs, and Long Time Old muses wistfully on the nature of love itself; at the other, Light As A Feather (Jenny's Song) is a gentle and uplifting song despite its introspective take of the nature of mortality. Perhaps with the most 'edge', Flesh & Blood examines the deep misogynies found everywhere in modern life; from pornography to organised religion.

Later in the album, No Revolution is an unapologetically reference-strewn homage to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It begins with the dark horror of the Chapman shooting at the Dakota, featuring a radio report from a local NY station. Then ruminating on Lennon's well-known (ambiguous) views on the validity of political revolutions, it contains a few badly-hidden references to the pessimism of 'Working Class Hero' as well. It's perhaps also a wider observation of the insanity some seem to exhibit when presented with mega-fame. And yet, refusing to bow to misery, the lyrics also celebrate the timeless optimism of 'Imagine'.

Invisible lightens the mood a little, featuring an ageing hippy, diminished by the tyranny of youth around him, resenting becoming all-but-invisible, whilst he nurses his whisky. Then again, he still manages to step out with the pretty lady at the bar as the credits roll. Was she real though? Was he real? Does it even matter if no-one can see you?

Last but not least, perhaps chiming with the timeless concepts behind the rest of the album, but with tongue-firmly-in-cheek, Look Under That Rock asks us to imagine the band's avatars being electro-ported to Mars a hundred years from now, and playing to thousands of cheering Martians at the yet-to-be-built Gale Crater Space Coliseum *.

(* - which is why we're so grateful to NASA's Burt Ulrich for allowing us to use the images from ''Curiosity' for our album cover. Cheers Burt ;-) ).

In any event, hopefully there's something on this album for everyone ...

To download, go to Telegram