The Real McKenzies
Beer and Loathing
(Fat Wreck Chords)
4.5/5
Vancouver punks The Real McKenzies’ 11th album, Beer and Loathing, transforms Celtic punk’s aging horse into a gelding made of bagpipes and distortion. Beer and Loathing comes out like combat boots having gone for a shoemaker’s resole: broken in yet soles new, shiny, and black.
Vocalist Paul McKenzie spews Bigfoot-printed earworms over a Lion’s Gate Bridge car-stopping, Sasquatch sound. The album’s battle-cry subjects, from murdered Indigenous women and children to forgotten soldiers, take society to task. Renditions of poems by Robert W. Service and Robert Burns prove that McKenzie is Canada’s 21st-century blue-collar, kilt-clad, punk bard.
The Real McKenzies, fully discontented and fully punk, are in good spirits. If songs like “Beer and Loathing” or “Nary Do Gooder” were drinks they’d be boilermakers.
The only thing wrong with this record is that it’s too short. An easy solution: just play it again. And again. And again. As McKenzie says, it’s our weekend, but it’s The Real McKenzies’ life.