Pagan Wanderer Lu - Fight My Battles For Me

As a strong believer that the music industry’s pretentious undercurrent of image-obsession, genre-diving and stereotype reproduction is something that is slowly destroying the quality of its output, the inability to be pigeon-holed, due to an album that darts across the board of all musical styles and tastes, is something we would normally wholeheartedly support an artist for. But sometimes, it goes wrong.

‘Fight My Battles For Me’ is a proverbial blender crammed full of noise rock, pop, psych, metal and folk, chucked in with lyrics that lack any real significance; something fully embodied by ‘The Gentleman’s Game’ which gets on it’s clichéd Daily Mail-esque soapbox with some vague and unnecessary reference to immigration.

The album possesses all the sporadic and chaotic tendencies of the likes of Modest Mouse and many of the lyrics are quite well thought out and rather quirky. But in the same way as The Blair Witch Project or a Lady Ga Ga outfit, Pagan Wanderer Lu’s, a.k.a. Andy Regan’s, brainchild just has far too much going on in it’s 50 minute duration (and yes, it is too long).

Whilst many eccentrics will perhaps revel in the unpredictable mishmash of this one man band, others will be left feeling like they’ve been penetrated by some camp model of propaganda as ‘Memorial Hall’ spews the devoid lyric: ‘If there’s a point in the fighting / Any point at all / It’s so we can dance in the memorial hall.’

Production wise, it’s clear that Regan has a talent and an overarching ability to produce truly different sounds and music that defies all music industry pigeon holing and classification. But this is somewhat whitewashed by the occasionally overpowering lo-fi and slightly boring attempt at social commentary.