Mushroom Cloud

Description

"I don't think there's any good reason to make an album like this. Not in any logical way." This is the answer you get when asking the Irish Songwriter A.S. Fanning how he arrived at making an album that is so bleak and apocalyptical it leaves you gasping for air. The word melancholy is far too weak to describe this. A.S. Fanning seems to be the level-headed chronicler of a perishing world. Realistic/pessimistic. His album "Mushroom Cloud" is far more than that though. In the organic and analogue production of this album, the expansive rock band builds stunning melodic arcs around Fanning's warm baritone voice. In connection with his inauspicious topics this leads to a bizarre enthrallment. Listening all the way through can feel like staring into a deep dark well for a little too long. Textually, Mushroom Cloud can be described as an update to Leonard Cohen's "The Future". Paranoia, Isolation during COVID lockdowns, climate change, war, autocrats, populists, the internet as a battlefield and the precise registration of each and every moment, while the eyes linger on an advertisement in the timeline. It's not getting any more positive than that, even if you are truly looking for that glimmer of hope - "I haven't really looked for any silver linings in this myself. I suppose the best I can do is to see it as a document of a low point. A sort of scorched earth that hopefully leads to a new beginning." If it brings some comfort, he at least adds shortly afterwards that writing helps him to build up a critical distance to his own thinking: "I found myself laughing at some of the lyrics I had written, which I think is quite a healthy thing, to be able to take a step back from your darker thoughts and see the absurdity in them." A.S. Fanning has never been a particularly cheerful artist. His last album, "You Should Go Mad" (2020) borrows its title from a line in Melville's "Moby Dick" and circles around paranoia and anxiety. A.S. Fanning played his first gig at the age of 12, in a pub on the outskirts of Dublin where they would turn a blind eye to the musician's age. He had his first band with original songs at the age of 16, one year later they would flare-up shortly in the Irish charts. For a while he toured the world playing bass in the backing band of an Irish musician, and in between he made some money playing Johnny Cash covers in the pubs of Dublin. To make ends meet with the meagre income of a musician he moved to Berlin in 2011, to concentrate more on his own songs and their production. The music turned darker, the instrumentation more sparse, and voice and lyrics were brought into focus. "Mushroom Cloud" is A.S. Fanning's third Berlin album, and a preliminary peak of this creative period. It is the first time in his solo career that he employs a consistent band line-up throughout an album, working out arrangements with his co-musicians Bernardo Sousa (electric guitar), Dave Adams (organ, piano), Jeff Collier (drums) and Felix Buchner (bass).