There’s something inherently funny about a band called I Plead Irony spending ten years making an album about contradiction. You could accuse them of taking the joke too far, but then This Monologue Conversation arrives and makes a rather persuasive case for letting them have the last laugh.
The third album from Farnborough trio I Plead Irony has had an absurdly long gestation. Years later, they came back to it because, apparently, they had the radical idea that maybe good songs should actually be released.
The end result is an eleven-song album of the most natural-sounding alt-rock that truly embraces and recognizes its dour nature without taking itself too seriously. Expect some punk and some blues on the fringes, while the crunching guitars and rocking rhythm section keep the eleven tracks bouncing. Ultimately, however, I Plead Irony never feels quite miserable enough to be granted a medal for the loneliest person in a room at any point. Rather, they feel like three friends who love the shit out of making music, and that translates on and through the record, too.
Because This Monologue Conversation is dealing with some pretty heavy stuff. Fear, conformity, identity, self-destruction, the possible collapse of civilization, and all the fun ways people manage to make their own lives harder. Basically, the kind of stuff you’d normally avoid thinking about if you’re trying to have a nice afternoon.
Thankfully, I Plead Irony don’t treat any of it like they need to spend the entire album sitting in a dark room looking dramatically miserable. There’s enough energy, humor and personality in the music to keep all that darkness from becoming exhausting.
“Inside the Lines” is a good example of how the band pulls this off. The drums come in with plenty of energy, the guitars grind away underneath them, and Jordan’s low vocals give the song a darker edge. The song is about boundaries and the limits we put around ourselves, and while it started from a personal perspective, the pandemic has given those ideas a much bigger context. After everything that happened over the past few years, songs about conformity and freedom are bound to hit differently.
The best part is that the song doesn’t have to spell all of this out for you. It just gets increasingly tense as Jordan’s vocals rise and the music opens up around him. The song has changed because the world listening to it has changed. And, annoyingly, it works really well.
From the eeriness and uncertainty of “History,” one finds oneself looking at things on a slightly more general scope. “History” inherently has that sing-along quality thanks to the sheer fullness and fuzziness that accompanies its guitars, along with those heavier strings, pounding drums and crashing cymbals that lend themselves to a real sense of anxiety within the tune. Ultimately, the point is simple: can you even say that humans are moving anywhere at all, or do we just make very similar mistakes each and every damn time around?
And that’s the fun contradiction at the heart of “History.” It’s catchy enough to get stuck in your head while making you think about whether humanity is capable of learning from its own mistakes. Honestly, it might be one of the more appropriate songs to have playing while you’re scrolling through the news and wondering what on earth everyone is doing.
Despite all those big ideas, This Monologue Conversation never feels weighed down by them. A lot of that comes from the fact that I Plead Irony sound like three people who actually like playing together. There’s a natural looseness to the performances.
You might expect that kind of interrupted production to result in something disjointed. Instead, This Monologue Conversation feels remarkably coherent. More importantly, it does not sound like a museum piece rescued from a hard drive simply because nobody could bear to delete it.
The closing “Falling Upwards” provides the album with its most hopeful moment, turning toward love and connection without suddenly pretending that all the problems raised across the record have been solved. There is no triumphant cinematic ending where everyone learns an important lesson and the credits roll. Thank God. That would be terrible.
Instead, the album ends on something more modest and believable: the possibility that connection matters even when everything else is confusing.
And that brings us back to the album’s strangest accomplishment. This Monologue Conversation is fundamentally about contradiction, but its greatest argument is surprisingly straightforward. Three friends have spent roughly two decades making music together. They started an album, life got in the way, and eventually they returned because they still believed the songs deserved to exist.
After waiting ten years to hear it, This Monologue Conversation makes a pretty convincing case that some records really are worth waiting for. I Plead Irony takes anxiety, contradiction and an impressive amount of self-reflection and turns them into something that is, thankfully, still a lot of fun to listen to. It took the Farnborough trio a while to get here, but they’ve ended up with a rock album that knows when to be serious, when to have a laugh, and when to simply let the guitars do the talking.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
