Black 47 Takes on the War

MARCH is the biggest month of the year for our bloodline. Everything Irish is hot for the party that starts now and ends sometime later this month. For one band, this month will be about telling stories from the front lines of the war.

Black 47 has just released their hard-hitting new CD, IRAQ. As the name would imply, the band that sang about Michael Collins and Bobby Sands during the Troubles have turned their rebel eyes to the situation in Iraq with explosive results.

"Johnny's hurt/his blood's soaked in the dirt," snarls an enraged Larry Kirwan on "Stars and Stripes," a bare-knuckle bar band tune that recounts a roadside bomb ripping two friends apart.

It's not the musical green beer that most Irish bands will be serving these weeks, but IRAQ is infinitely more satisfying nonetheless.

"What I'm trying to do is give people a sense of what it's like to be on the front lines in Iraq," says Kirwan, who says he was inspired in large part by the many Black 47 fans who email him while on active duty.

"There's a big need for this as we get mostly sound bites from the media. I stopped watching TV many years ago when I realized I was getting dumber than normal - a harrowing thought."

Black 47 was the quintessential Irish American band when they started almost two decades ago, mixing urban street sounds that were fashionable in their adopted land at the time with traditional pipes and reels.

IRAQ continues that tradition as the band paints these war pictures with ragtime-infused melodies, funky backbeats, wailing horns that call to mind Clarence Clemmons' finest work with the E Street Band, and chunky power chords.

For the first time, Black 47 plays the blues on the biting "Sadr City." Though the song is blue, it is laced with black humor.

"The song is about a guy patrolling Moqtada Al Sadr's (the troops call him Mookie) vast section of Baghdad," explains Kirwan. "The soldier becomes obsessed with Mookie and what he might be up to. All the members of Black 47 are conversant with the blues, so it was about time that we used one of America's most renowned art forms."

A noted playwright outside the band, Kirwan brings his Great White Way smarts into the music with character driven lyrics. He steps into the role of grieving mother on the touching "Ballad of Cindy Sheehan," a song that recounts the pain of the antiwar activist who made headlines when she camped out at President George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas to protest the war that killed her son.

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Nster.com