AJJ are one of the few bands who can throat-punch my insecurities to the surface, forcing me to confront my deepest darkest thoughts in an unplanned manner. But I seem to always come back for another hit whenever they release a new record. This one came with the promise that it was lyrically their most punk album, but instrumentally it was their least punk album which really did peak my interest. "Good Luck Everybody", its really fitting title, also fills me with dread... So let's get into why.
"Normalization Blues" is a country blues song about terrible things in the world starting to become normalised as the name suggests. It's just Sean and his guitar. The stripped back style he employs adds a great deal of focus to the truth he is speaking in the words. In my opinion, it is one of best lyrical dissections of the world and how we connect, interpret and deal with it at the moment. Hearing this as the third single before the record came out left me in a stunned silence due to how well-crafted the lyrics are. There is so much to think about and unpick in this one song – it's a masterwork. I could write a whole examination on each and every line but to keep this review short, here are some of the most important lines from the record as a whole:
"Connection's more important now than it ever was, But I'd rather be alone." – This idea of knowing the importance of human connection but being discouraged from it at every opportunity due to some human beings being awful, ugly and hostile due to the views they have been manipulated into holding.
In the last verse, Sean says: "the ugliest word in the English language is Anthropocene". Anthropocene is the current geological age, where humans have biggest impact on the climate and the environment. He is completely right in this statement because I find it very ugly that a word for this even exists...
After dissecting the world we live in, the song finishes with the harrowing title of the album: "Good luck, everybody" – wishing us luck for our incoming futures in the described awful planet.
When "Body Terror Song"'s first line kicked in on my walk to the train station, it gave me the aforementioned emotional throat-punch. The words "I'm so sorry that you have to have a body" hit me, because I knew exactly where this song was going to go... that is, the pain of existing in a world full of awful dreadful people. The lyrics portray something I felt deep in my subconscious. My initial reaction was to laugh out loud followed immediately by a state of being unsettled, like a shiver down my spine knocking my brain out of place. The lyrics to this one are exactly why I love AJJ, this touched things in my head that not many other bands can, and they seem to do it every single record. This song also sounds like a bad acid trip in an elevator with the catchy jingle warping into something more insidious and haunting! It's a delightfully devilish little song topped with a piano melody.
This perfectly blends onto "Feedbag", which has haunting synth sounds making up most of the backing. A drum machine panning from ear to ear makes the sound very spooky with the almost groaning synths. The lyrics describe going out into a world that looks grey and trying your best to communicate with people that you thought you know, but who turn out to hold views that make you feel like you never knew them at all. He talks again about the "Golden age of dickotry", which was mentioned in the "Normalization Blues", to reinforce the selfishness of the reality which we live in. I really like the soundscape created here – it brings to mind a gothic world drained of colour.
This leads into track 5: "No Justice, No Peace, No Hope" which is a direct mirror of "No More Shame, No More Fear, No More Dread" which is track 5 off "The Bible 2". As you can probably guess from the title, it is not a positive song. This one is stripped back to piano and vocals to give it a really personal effect. The first words of this song are "The lake of dead black children that America created is getting fuller than the Founding Fathers even wanted". This lake is also referred to in the last song, reinforcing the fact that the world created in the last song is full of nothing but despair. The chord choices make it sound big and powerful while still sounding miserable. This really hits home for how fucked up AJJ thinks the whole of their nation is and how depressed it makes them feel. Some great lyrics in this one are "My leaders led by nothing-men, dick-first into oblivion", which is a great summary of Trump and his cronies. "Now they upsell us our dignity like some fucked V.I.P. package" describes how corporations sell things back to us that they took from us to begin with. The song ends with the title "No Justice, No Peace, No Hope" and, the first time I heard this song, those words made me burst into tears.
There are definitely two halves to this record, the first being worrying, scary and downright depressing, but the second half is a lot more positive. "Mega Guillotine 2020" is very much a song that goes with its video, it sounds almost like a song from a children's TV show, but it's about voting for a big death dealing machine to come execute all of the bad people who currently run the show, like some Teletubbies-meets-grand-French-Revolution shit. Everything about this one really gets stuck in your head: the tambourine, the ray of sunlight keyboards and the bell chimes. Mega Guillotine, I love you!
Number 7 is "Loudmouth". It sounds more like something from the last record, folk punk mixed with punk rock, electric guitars blend with acoustic to make it an angry song that comes across soft and cynical. It's lovely, the lyrics describe someone whose politics you agree with but is an asshole so you don't really want to associate with them. I have encountered so many people I could apply this to (hand-on-heart, including myself at some points), so it's really relatable.
"Maggie" is a nice happy sounding song about owning a dog from the perspective of the dog and that dog emotionally supporting their owner. It came across creepy at first, because I thought it was about humans not dogs... my bad.
"Psychic Warfare" is about killing Trump with your mind because he is evil. AJJ had played this in a live session before this album version came out, where it was a punk rock song with guitars, so it was a surprise that the album version is all strings. It makes it sound wonderful, like they are painting a beautiful art piece to then set fire to at every show. I also love the idea of putting all your hate into a piece of art and it coming out as this beautiful song called Psychic Warfare, in contrast to putting all your love into a song!
"Your Voice, As I Remember It" is a lovely song about missing the sound of someone's voice. It's a slow, full-band song that sounds like a lovely stroll through a flowery meadow. Not really my thing, but I bet it's someone's favourite, and it sets a nice transition between "Psychic Warfare" and our final track: "A Big Day For Grimley".
This is a nice bluesy song stripped down to AJJ's base components once again: acoustic guitar, bass and Sean's voice. This song is about having hope looking forward to the future, because you know the world is bullshit. Words like "I live in a fortress the shape of my body" describe being more cynical about the world and how we react by shutting our selves off to the things that upset us. The ending has hope that everyone gets what they want with lines like "Arcades for the ADHD" and "Health for the sickly". It creates a picture of a world where we are satisfied. The last words fit this perfectly: "Good Luck Everybody", then a tune is whistled which fades out into a strong end. It's a really pretty song that does a lot to tie up the themes of the record, leaving you with a little bit of light in your pit of despair.
This record is another perfectly produced, beautiful, terror-inducing masterpiece from AJJ. I truly hope we can leave some of the nightmares described by these songs behind in 2020, but until then I can use some of these songs to wallow in my despair, with other songs providing a little bit of hope that I'm not the only one in pit longing for escape. Thanks AJJ and Good Luck Everybody.
PS. Mega Guillotine for 2020!
Steam and download Good Luck Everybody here.
Like AJJ here.
This review was written by Dan Kilvert.
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