Description: Music and politics that matter.
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Frank Turner’s Be More Kind manages to be both the most optimistic and pessimistic album so far in 2018. It’s at once comforting and unsettling, hopeful and desperate, which I suppose is no surprise from a guy whose last studio album was called Positive Songs for Negative People.
Most of the optimism on Be More Kind comes in the form of the personal—the simple admonition of the title track, the counsel in “Don’t Worry” to “spend more time with the do’s than with the don’ts,” and the recurring themes of meeting in the middle and finding common ground. Those lyrics might seem like eye-rolling bromides on the page, but with Turner and his band the Sleeping Souls behind them, they’re rousing calls to action.
It’s not much of a leap to get here from “we can always get better, because we’re not dead yet” from 2015’s “Get Better.” Still, there’s a whole lot more at stake now than in 2015, and Turner knows it. The singer angered some of his fans a few years back with an interview in which he slammed the left and proclaimed himself a libertarian; that felt like it was in direct opposition to the communal spirit of his songs and his shows. But he seems to have changed his tune on Be More Kind, and admits as much in “