Mortal Prophets - The American Junkie Show (Lux Astralis Music)

America, perhaps more so than most other countries, is very good at celebrating itself through its music. Venture into the more conservative sonic realms, and you can’t throw an apple pie without hitting some cowboy crooner singing about how great the land of his birth is or a wide-eyed indie kid waxing lyrical about how his country has so much to teach those realms not blessed with being America…if only he could find them on a map.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with loving your country, but blind faith can only ever tell one small, skewed part of the story. That is why we need people like John Beckmann and his Mortal Prophets to discuss the more difficult issues of the day.

Of course, timing is everything, and this new EP, landing a month out from either another Trump presidency or the country’s first female holder of the office, couldn’t be more perfect. History, or histrionics, in the making.

This sonic menage-a-trois plays around with some fantastic musical and lyrical tropes – the opening, titular track being the sound of the “Star-Spangled Banner” on ketamine, its warped and wasted sound turning this national anthem into a blasted soundtrack as it slips from the familiar refrains into the declaration … “I’m an American Junkie, down on my knees.” This long, evolving song then lays out the landscape as John Beckmann sees it – a place of rampant profit, opiate abuse and big brother style surveillance…the dark underbelly of Manifest Destiny, the American Dream turned Global Nightmare.

The remaining two tracks, “American Junkie” and “An American Scene”, are the two constituent parts of the opening track, both in their own right with much to say but becoming more than the sum of their sonic parts when played in that entire form.

It’s a bleak vision, but perhaps more honest than the flag saluting, one nation under God, world police, bombing for peace, democracy weilding, might is right, image that seems to be being pushed out through Fox News and foreign policy to the rest of the world.

Beckmann’s words could prove to be strangely prophetic, hard as they are for many to swallow. They say that a prophet is not recognized in his own land…but it’s not all about profit, is it? (That joke works better when spoken out loud.)

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