Frank Turner – Poetry Of The Deed

You probably know the story by now. Former punk shifts to the acoustic guitar and goes on to release albums of socially conscious ‘protest music’. Frank Turner (formally of Million Dead) is far from the first to go down this route and he won’t be the last either, yet there seems to be something about Turner that’s captured the hearts of a fair few listeners and now with his third album in as many years he’s in danger of turning the cult following into proper mainstream success.

Many will baulk at Turner’s blend of acoustic/folk and punk influences but it’s a steadfast formula that works for the man, and now with this album being the first to be written and arranged with the full backing band it’s all properly slotting into place. Take ‘Try This At Home’ for instance, which with it’s rapidity and use of traditional instruments could go down rather well at a ceilidh, all the while talking the punk rhetoric of ‘anyone can make music’. It’s obviously his lyrics more than anything that Turner still cares about, shown by them being printed in full in the sleeve notes and each song contains at least one memorable slogan seemingly tailor made to be scrawled on a school book or notepad.

It’s obvious that Frank Turner has assimilated a massive amount of music in his life and it does all come out in the music, a fan of The Offspring (and their classic album ‘Smash’), this appears most in the vocal inflections whilst the use of harmonica, in all likelihood deriving from Turner’s folk side, makes us think that he’s listened to a fair amount of Springsteen. The overall mix also reminds of his former tour mates The Holloways, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In terms of taking his leftist message to the people (the message being one of the power of people and to a lesser extent the power of music to affect change), it’s unlikely that ‘Poetry of the Deed’ will convert anyone to the cause that’s not already susceptible to it, but this record and Frank Turner in general may well prove pivotal to the ideological development of a select group of young people. In other words this does exactly what a punk record should do in this day and age, and it’s a damn sight better than having to suffer the crap that Green Day continue to put out.