Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom - Never Work (2020)

As members of Canadian indie darlings The Burning Hell, Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt created some of the wittiest and wordiest songs of the last decade or so. Kom’s literary-slacker songwriting and the band’s lo-fi energy saw them touted as natural successors to the Silver Jews, and their hard-touring work ethic earned them a cult following, particularly in Europe. On their first album as a duo, 2015’s Don’t Believe The Hyperreal, they forged a new path as a kind of millennial Lee and Nancy.

Never Work, the duo’s second release away from the Burning Hell moniker, is an album about how employment and production are changing as capitalism destroys itself. Given how fast that change is taking place, there is always the danger of a project like this sounding outdated before it hits the shelves, particularly in light of recent uncertainties. But Kom and Sharratt get around that by creating an imagined future, and imagination is key here: this is a future peopled by utterly believable characters in uncannily recognisable scenarios, but the wealth of artistic and personal detail means these songs are more than just speculative microfictions.

The pair take their cue from folk music, specifically the protest movement. But this is no mere folk revival. There is a lot more going on. The title track sounds, on the surface at least, more like a stripped-back Belle and Sebastian than anything else. It’s a pretty duet of love, nostalgia and anti-establishment arson. Kom’s songs are often full of punchlines, and this one is no different. But it isn’t a cheap trick – the timing is spot-on, and the juxtaposition of sweetness and violence is perfectly judged. The small details make it – the smell of sulfur, the shared hatred of racket sports.

Things take a darker (but somehow prettier) turn on Monitors. Sharratt sings, over a delicate chamber-pop backing of woodwind and piano, about a doomed office and the lassitude of its workers. Everything For Everyone introduces blippy electronics, but the lyrics are what really get you in the guts: it is an apocalyptic future-folk ballad, but the apocalypse here is slow, unsure, ambiguous. Somehow it’s both peppy and terrifying. The same could be said for Rise Up, Alexa, a robot call to arms that reflects the songs of America’s pre-war labour movement (and the walk-on appearance from Alexa herself, momentarily adding a third voice to the duo, is brilliantly executed).

On the surface Never Work is lyrically dense, in the simple sense that there are a lot of words to get through, a lot of images to process. A quick glance at the words of The Rich Stuff, for example, or The Robots Vs. Mrs Patel, makes you wonder just how they manage to cram such an abundance of novelistic detail into what in the end are pretty minimal-sounding songs. As I have said, the timing is effortless, and Kom has an uncanny ability to pull a vocal melody out of nowhere and weave it into the thorniest of lyrics. The music of protest needs to be clever enough to make its point decisively and simple enough to make its point clearly. And ideally, there needs to be a chorus you can get behind. Kom and Sharratt do this well: Two Jeffs, a timely takedown of the moral decay of big business, is a case in point.

Elsewhere, there is a healthy dose of self-referential (and self-deprecating) humour on Talking Gig Economy Blues, and while the nods to Dylan and Guthrie are clear and acknowledged, the message is entirely contemporary. The biggest surprise is a tender and subtle version of folk revivalist Malvina Reynolds’ I Don’t Mind Failing. But perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise: Never Work is by far Kom’s most impassioned and political lyrical statement to date. Augmented by Sharratt’s superb, understated singing and musicianship, it shows just how relevant protest music is, and how much fun it can be.