Punk noir — Rum Runner mix straight-up riffs with pulp fiction references
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Three albums into an eight-year career, Calgary’s Rum Runner has hit a milestone. What’s the Music Mean to You?, the band’s most recent full-length, is easily their best-sounding to date. It’s packed with fist-pumping anthems, shout-along choruses and songs that evoke wry smiles and knowing heartache — sometimes all at the same time. Despite all that, front man Al Drinkle is more impressed with the band’s newfound sense of time management.
“This is the first album we have ever released in the year that it has been recorded,” he says. “Every time we put out a record as a band, by the time it comes out, it’s not representative of us as a band. So this time we thought it was really important… that we come out of the studio and work really hard and get the album into people’s hands so they can hear what we are doing right now.”
Admittedly, Rum Runner hasn’t pulled a whiplash-style change since its last album came out in 2006. “It’s not like we could go deep into any other genre, I don’t think,” says Drinkle. Still, What’s the Music Mean to You? shows off the band’s subtlety and versatility more than ever before. Recorded this January with veteran local producer Casey Lewis, the record still has the frantic upstrokes and gruff vocals that earn the band a cask-full of comparisons to The Pogues. At the same time, it balances the banjo-tinted punk and traditional numbers with hints of blues and reggae.
“The songs aren’t as fast as they used to be, and I guess that is something that comes with age,” says Drinkle. “[We] were conscious in the studio this time that we were going to bring the distortion levels down on the guitar.”
Don’t think the band is going soft, though. This refined musical approach lets listeners immerse themselves in Drinkle’s vibrant lyrical world. Smart and immediate, the themes of love and loss get filtered through vintage pop culture. Dirty Harry and Sam Spade live side by side in the heartbroken protagonist of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Drunk Man.” Hemmingway is name-checked in “Tobacco Eyes.” And “Love’s Lovely Counterfeit” shares its title with a pulp novel by James M. Cain. Separately, these references make a great bibliography; in the context of the songs, they offer universal context for Drinkle’s personal stories.
“I write songs basically for myself,” he says. “It’s a punk rock take on the books and moves that I like.”
With that MO, it’s no surprise that my conversation with Drinkle soon veers from the songs in question to the trading of supplementary reading lists. As eloquent as he is debating the merits of James Joyce and Jim Thompson, it seems there is still one question that needs to be answered, especially considering the title of the new album — What’s the Music Mean to You? His answer, given the literary content of his lyrics, is appropriately ironic.
“Less and less,” he says with a chuckle.
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