Down With Liberty… Up With Chains!, by Chain & The Gang

Down With Liberty… Up With Chains!

by Chain & The Gang

Full Digital Discography

77

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	1.	Chain Gang Theme (I See Progress)
	2.	Cemetery Map
	3.	Trash Talk
	4.	Reparations
	5.	What Is A Dollar?
	6.	Interview With The Chain Gang
	7.	Deathbed Confession
	8.	Room 19
	9.	(Lookin’ For A) Cave Girl
	10.	Unpronounceable Name

about

The 2009 debut album from the chain gang led by Ian Svenonius (Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Weird War) is a masterpiece of primitivism. From dazzling set pieces of R'n'B and rock’n’roll, the band forms highly melodic songs full of call-and-response chants (“What Is A Dollar”), or invites you to take a walk through the cemetery (“Cemetry Map”), which sounds so spooky as if voodoo master Dr. John had thought it up. Sometimes Svenonius just grabs a wooden guitar to make fun of conspiracy theories like in “Deathbed Confessions”: “I faked the moon landing, I saved Hitler’s brain. Yeah, it’s in Argentina but it controls the USA.” Calvin Johnson produced the album at his Dub Narcotic studio and also did a bit of background vocals. The beat lurches and sways as confidently and surely as an old sea dog’s gait in a breeze of doppelkorn. The somewhat odd album title is explained by the always conceptually thinking singer as follows: “Everywhere freedom goes, it leaves a path of destruction. Fast food, bad architecture, materialism, unbridled greed, destroyed environment, imperial conquests, class struggle; combined, these phenomena are seemingly synonymous with freedom.” When big words often hide only capitalist greed and imperialist war, Svenonius and Co. prefer to slip into the role of dissidents.

credits

released July 2, 2021

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Sounds of Subterrania Hamburg, Germany

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