Cheap irony aside, it truly is amazing to me how far things have come in that respect. One can put together an entire album of tunes in the comfort of one’s own home and upload them to teh intarweb for all the world to glory in, without ever having to deal with the commercial side of things – labels, managers, producers, etc. (Just as one can write whatever feeble-minded dribble one cares to spew about such efforts and “publish” them alongside actually talented people, a la Your Humble Correspondent.) Gone are the days when an artist had to be on a major label to have a record out. Or, indeed, a label at all.

I’ve received a couple of links to this sort of self-made, self-released album within the last few months. One of them is today’s main course. Let’s dig in, shall we?

If you’re expecting lush production values from Aaron McMullan’s 75mg, you’re just gonna be disappointed. It is, without a doubt, the most ultra-mega lo-fi recording I’ve clapped ears on in a long time. This is not necessarily a drawback, mind you. One might go so far as to say that it’s part of the charm. I think it’s down to the equipment available rather than any sort of aesthetic statement, but I’m reluctant to speak for the artist.

The music itself is spare, usually just McMullan and his acoustic guitar. There’s some bass playing by Darren Worth behind a couple of tracks and some sort of percussion (sounds like multi-tracked hand claps, but who knows?). McMullan, in his email to me, described the project as “some sorta acoustic folk / punk / blues / whining tomfoolery”; I’d say it’s more in the folk idiom than anything else, really. There are definitely some old-school folk rhythms in play here, if we must get bogged down in pinpointing genre.

The music is just a delivery vehicle for the lyrics, anyway. Words words words, densely packed and piled one atop another. Many of them on the more miserable-due-to-unrequited-love side; a well-plowed furrow, I think we can all agree, yet one not likely to go fallow as long as there are hearts to be broken. Yes? Some of it teeters on the brink of being overblown – hell for all I know it falls right over and plummets to the desert floor below with just a little *puff* of dust cloud to indicate impact, but I stopped paying attention in my English classes back in seventh grade so who am I to say – but having been the forlorn bereft lover a time or two in my younger days, (shut UP), it still resonates for me. “City smells of paperbacks rolled up in jacket pockets / paperbacks that serve to say, ‘Yes I’m well-read, now, will you fuck me?’”, from “City Country City”? That’s my twenties tied up in a neat little bundle there. And as for “She sat reading Burroughs in parks painted Autumn, by trees bent and broken with age / And notin’ down lines that may soothe her in time, on receipts tucked in tween every page / And startled by ghosts singing songs long forgotten, I woke, I just lay for a while / Watching the walls, and the night-time slowly fading”, from “First Flight Grounded”, well, I’m in no position to tell you if it’s good poetry or not but in the context of the song it definitely works. I have to admit that when I saw the title “Sinead In Savage Purple” I was more than a little concerned, but the song itself, a slow lament for a lost love full of sadness and hagiography, is much better than it’s title.

McMullan croaks out his tunes in a voice somewhere between that of Leonard Cohen and the guy from Crash Test Dummies. If you’re not into the whole “singers without a huge range” thing, this may not be the set for you. This is not to say that McMullan’s voice is bad, by any stretch, but neither is it conventionally, uh, “good” or “pretty”. It is what it is, and it does what he wants it to do. And ultimately, who can argue with that? There’s no ProTools at work here, no pitch-shifting or corrections of any sort, just a naked human voice with all the inherent imperfections on display. Deal with it.

And while we’re on the subject of dealing with it, I suppose I should interject a note here for the easily offended. McMullan is Irish, and sounds it; to these American ears his accent is pretty clear, but he’s got this glottal stop that renders a word such as “country” as “CUNT’ree”. This may or may not be intentional. Be that as it may, the casual F-bombs dropped here and there will probably scare off anyone who’d take issue with that before they got to that particular song (“City Country City”), so maybe there’s no point in bringing it up after all.

The stand-out cut, for me, is definitely “Go Fuck Yourself”, which is not the angry diatribe you might anticipate from the title but rather McMullan poking a bit of fun at himself and his cruising abilities. The payoff is in the attention to detail:

An so I’m standing
By the back wall
An they’re playing something off of some Peel Session by The Fall
And there’s nobody singing along…
Cept for this girl, she’s got a Misfits t-shirt on…

And I watch her
And she sees me,
And by the time the record’s changed she’s brought her drink over beside me
Says "I like the way you dig the way I dance…
If I was sober, mind, you wouldn’t have a chance"

This flash of self-deprecation is a welcome respite from the onslaught of poetic misery. Not that he does poetic misery poorly, mind you; I could point you at a thousand others who truly should not be let anywhere near recording equipment, and I’m sure you could do the same for me. The thing is, though, it does tend to wear a fella down after awhile, no matter how well it’s done. Plus there are so few people who can do the whole jilted romantic bit and still laugh at themselves, it’s nice to see it here.

So, if this sounds at all interesting to you (and I hope it does, because it is a good, if occasionally flawed, set), go grab yourself a copy here. Besides, it’s free. And freedom’s just another word for… well, you know.