Flogging Molly singing of working-class struggles at Thomas & Mack

It's an album populated by working men with no work.

The setting is Detroit, where the power's out and even dogs are leaving home for lack of bones.

It might qualify as a hard luck tale, except that it's no tale.

This is the thematic thrust of "Speed of Darkness," the fifth and most recent album from Irish rock energy bomb Flogging Molly, which was written in part in the Motor City, where frontman Dave King lives half of the year.

King's bandmates joined him in the basement of his home there for three weeks last year as they hashed out the album.

They would lunch each day in Royal Oak, Mich., a nearby bastion of business amid the surrounding burnout of Detroit.

It was here that the narrative for "Darkness" came to light.

"There's a lot of little neighborhoods like that, where people are really struggling and fighting hard to keep their communities alive," says Flogging Molly multi-instrumentalist Bob Schmidt, who plays mandolin, banjo and more. "We would just get to talk to people every day, telling us about what their family has gone through, how their shops are closing down, how their schools are closing down. And yet, at the same time, all these small communities were banding together to protect themselves and to educate each other. They were helping each other out."

This interaction between the band and the people around them manifests itself directly on "Darkness," a stirring song cycle about the struggles of working class Americans where Flogging Molly continues to hone their skill at using traditional Irish instrumentation and song structures in nontraditional ways.

"Forgive me for dreaming, it's all I have left, except this pending foreclosure and mountains of debt," King sings on an album predicated on the band's attempt at mining a measure of hope from hardship. "From the town of Detroit where we fight till we drop, we don't want your pity we just want a job."

This country may be in the midst of an economic recovery, but few of the folks that the band encountered daily in Michigan were feeling it.

"The story, at the time when this album came out, was that the mortgage crisis was over and the bailout worked," Schmidt says. "And while that's partially true, it certainly in no way had trickled down to a lot of the people we were talking to. What we were noticing is that people were really bummed out about the fact that their experience wasn't reflected in the mainstream media, that what they were going through seemed to be an anomaly.

"The more people we talked to, the more we realized that those experiences were not an anomaly, that the actual story in the mainstream of economic recovery is more of an anomaly," he continues. "When you have that many people who feel disconnected from the narrative of the country, that kind of disenfranchisement can really destroy things."

And so the band made a record that was all about speaking up for those whom few people were really speaking for, at least as they saw it.

Think of it as a way of providing misery with some good company.

"I think that the theme really resonates with what a lot of people are feeling right now," Schmidt says. "More so, than the other albums, people are really relating to the subject matter of what we're singing about in these songs."

Much of this has to do with the crucible in which "Darkness" was created.

This isn't a concept album, even though there is a narrative thread shot through it all.

This is real life.

What a concept.

"I think it is important to get yourself immersed in what you're doing," Schmidt says of the band's decision to experience the setting in which "Darkness" takes place. "It's difficult to talk about this kind of stuff if you're just in Beverly Hills in some posh studio getting your toenails done. You've got to get your feet wet every once in a while."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at
jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476