WAЯ By THE ALARM - They Got This

I few weeks ago I had the pleasure of previewing the album WAЯ by THE ALARM. As a life-long Alarm fan, I’ve seen just about everything from them as a band. From DIY records and fake bands, to top-40 hits and songs written specifically to call out record company hubris, from albums written over the course of years, to albums like this one: written and recorded in 50 days to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. And boy does it do just that.

The gloriously dirty power chords of “Protect and Survive” begin the album. They sound much more powerful than the youtube.com previews the band recorded to document the process of making the record. I laughed out loud when I first I heard the lyrics in this song.
“280 ways to kill us all”.
280.
It’s gallows humor.
It’s The length of a Tweet.

This song is about the destruction wrought from four years of having a malignant narcissist as president. One can sense in this song the collective trauma of an entire generation who saw the leader of the free world, the man with the big red button, the holder of the nuclear football, insulting world leaders and private citizens alike, one Tweet at a time.

“280 ways to start a war”.

When the music changes, Mike Peters quotes directly from actual Tweets. Crushing guitars and ironic lyrics harken back to his punk inspirations from “God Save The Queen”. This song could have been called ‘American Idiot’ but that title has already been taken

“We Got This” is a true anthemic rocker if there ever was such a thing. The initial power-chords remind me a bit of “Knife Edge'' from The Alarm’s Strength album. The song is “Infectious”. I know that’s not best word to use for a song whose aim is to inspire the world to pull through a pandemic, but f*ck. This song is INFECTIOUS.

The Alarm are fighting fire with fire.

The song is a mix of Bryan Adams, Van Halen, AC/DC, Queen and a whole lot of Alarm all wrapped in an inspiring, kick-ass package. To me, its total hit, a true anthem for a generation no longer in need of irony.

In the opening lyrics of “Tribes[Stop the War]”, Mike Peters sings in the same cadence as in 1994’s “Back Into The System”. “The only thing a man can do is stay alive, and try to stop the war! Before we all burn out”. Just a bit later he sings about the U.S. Capitol being invaded. He urges: “Let’s start by accepting the outcome of the vote. Democracy is the only way that we shall overcome”

These are direct head-on lyrics written from a place of shock and fear, from witnessing the fabric of the free world nearly ripped open for all to see. Mike Peters’ songs are a constant mix of allusion, allegory, and irony, in different measures. In a manner similar to mid-stage Bruce Springsteen, he sometimes plays games with his lyrics, attempting to make his point while keeping people guessing. Not in “Tribes”. His true intentions though are not to condemn, but to find common ground.

“While the power on the right fights the power on the left”,

Peters sings directly quoting the song “Marching On” from the 1982 single by The Alarm,
and then he expresses his true feelings, the ones that magically brings anarchists punks, hippies, and Christians alike to join together as one at Alarm concerts:

“let’s fight for those who stood against us, let’s fight for those we were with”.

This is Mike Peters’ constant optimism. The idea we can make things better for ourselves if, to quote his song “Who’s Gonna Make The Peace”,

“we can just get along”

The next song, “Still Unsafe” is a ballad with an absolutely killer piano melody, in the spirit of the best previous Alarm ballads like , “Broken Silence”, “Plastic Carrier Bags” and “No Greater Love”

This song finds Mike Peters in a reflective state similar to “After The Rock And Roll Is Gone” wondering if these will be his last set of songs. Every artist must wonder if the song they are writing will be their last. “What if no new song ever arrives after this?”

To combat that feeling, Mike Peter’s mines the lyrics of his very first Alarm song. “Unsafe Building”, a song about tearing everything down to build it back up again, to discover that he himself indeed, is still “Unsafe”.

However, there is more here than what’s on the surface. In this song Peters name checks the song “Let The River Run Its’ Course” from 1991’s Raw, and I’m reminded that “WAЯ” started out as a reworking of that very same album. Mike Peters has spent the last 10 years remaking the albums of The Alarm with new interpretations. The most striking being “The Stream” from 2019, which tackles both “Eye Of The Hurricane” (1987) and “Change” (1989) in an absolutely breathtaking double concept album. The Alarm’s Raw from 1991 was not a great album on the surface, but if you listen between the lines, it’s the recorded document of a band breaking-up in real-time. Reworking Raw was really not in the cards. Peters instead decided to make a new album in the spirit of how he felt Raw should have been made 30 years ago. WAЯ is that album

One line from “Still Unsafe”, “When does a car run out of fuel?” might be a direct reference to the song “The Road” that appeared on The Alarm’s “best of”' album Standards (1990). It was the song that was supposed to be the lead track on Raw, but instead was snapped up by Miles Copeland at IRS record to be the token new song on Standards, leaving “Raw” without a center position the band could circle-around and attack the changing tide of alternative rock in the 1990s.

Standards included a reworked version of “Unsafe Building” called “Unsafe Building 1990”, and that iitself carried a double meaning as Mike Peters left The Alarm soon after in 1991 because he needed to, again, “tear it all down and build it back up again.” In this way, Mike Peters is using “Still Unsafe” as a song with multiple touch points from the past 40 years.

“I burned all the bridges, put the fires out, so they could still be crossed” he sings near the end of the song, and it occured to me that there is only time to make amends until that time is gone.

Something else dawned on me right then while listening: being “unsafe” doesn’t mean being destructive, it means being “reconstructive”.

To build it back up.
That’s the message.

Next up is , “Crush” “You Can’t Crush us all” Peters sings directly at Covid-19 itself as soaring background vocals sound an ominous tone. An “Alarm” style harmonica blasts right before the bridge. Covid-19 is the enemy here, and it is “crushing” us. Crushing the music industry in particular, one that has been relying on public performances for the last decade so artists can put food on the table. The Crush is overpowering. The Crush is ominous. The Crush is something we never imagined, and then it happened anyway.

“All we need is another chance to live”

Much like “Crush”, “Warriors” is another absolute rocker that explodes out of the speakers.

“Vaccines and antidotes are not the only cure...There no enemy that I can see” “Check you intel, check your facts, before you press the button on drone attack”,.

Peters likens the virus to an invisible killer. But it’s not just the virus that’s invisible, but people behind the sock puppy accounts and 8kun anonymous posts creating the conspiracies and the misinformation about the virus It’s also about world leaders who should have known better, who used the virus as a way to hurt their political foes and question the science. Those actions have hurt people more than anyone or anything else.

“Peace is the counter attack. A white flag is the fight back”…“For warriors”...“Retreat is a way to say f*ck you”

Mike Peter knows in his heart that it takes the mind and effort of a “warrior” to create peace. Violence, mayhem, Twitter attacks: those things are easy. Truly creating peace is the hard road, the road less traveled, but the road he wants to be on

The next song “Fail” is a surprise. I did not recall it from any of the youtube.com previews. This song has one of the best soaring choruses I’ve ever heard, but with a twist that contains more truth than Mike Peters usually reveals.

“Keep on running, never stop, keep believing, trust no one, keep on dreaming, there’s nothing wrong with your direction, there’s always someone waiting for you to fail”

I interpreted the song this way: Sometimes you can do the best job in the world, but that just makes certain people angry because they see your failure as their success and vice versa. The music industry is probably the worst offender of this kind of activity. This means not always doing the things other people think are best, and many times it means leaving people behind when the art gets stale, or circumstances become unworkable. Mike Peters speaks his truth through his songs, but you have to listen Closely. What might appear negative to one person, is actually a song about overcoming obstacles.

“Gods And Demons” is the next song and it’s a slow burning scorcher in the spirit of the Mike Peters/Billy Duffy collaboration: ColourSound.

“Don’t let yourself be taken down. Don’t let yourself be fooled by Gods and Demons”
“This is the time to say enough is enough”

It’s obvious that the whole experience of Covid-19 has been a collective trauma, but also an individual one. Mike Peters appears to be saying, “ I empathize with you, I’ve been there too, but let’s get out of this thing in one piece”

The next song is the secret “cover” version that hinted at for five weeks now on youtube previews. The Alarm has been known to record some great covers, including a version of Neil Young's “Rockin In The Free World” released on Raw long before Pearl Jam discovered it.

This is a full-on rock version of Massive Attack’s 1991 top-40 hit “Safe From Harm” featuring vocals by welsh Singer/Songwriter Benji Webb. I like it. It fits very well with the album and the vocals by Benji Webb are awesome. This version starts with a guitar reminiscent of “Where A Town Once Stood” but then dips into a serious groove. If there is anything I can compare this to in The Alarm’s pantheon of songs, it could be a cross between ”Change 1” and “The Chant Has Just Begun”, if that is even possible.

The sentiment though is easier to understand: “Stay Safe” is basically the new greeting of the pandemic. It’s the “aloha” of the the world: the meaning changing only by the context in which it is used: “hello”, “goodbye”, “good luck”,”don’t catch the virus”, “wear your mask”, “wash your hands”, “don’t see friends”, “don’t see family”, “please don’t die”.

The last song from WAЯ by THE ALARM is the title track, “War [It’s Not Over Yet]” It makes perfect sense to end the album. Thirty years ago the the title track for Raw was the lead-off, which solidifies WAЯ as the “upside down” of Raw. “Upside Down” the key phrase, as the lyrics make perfectly clear in the chorus:

“Everything is upside down, everything is out of control!”

The song sums up everything perfectly.

“War is not over yet!” Mike Peters sings as the power chords fly in every direction.

“We just gotta get through this!”

The pace picks up with the refrain of “Out Of Control, Out Of Control” and that is how it ends.

There is much hope to be found in WAЯ by THE ALARM but the outcome is not insured either. No album is going to magically make everything better, but WAЯ by THE ALARM, with epic, career-best songs like “We Got This” , “Warriors” and “Still Unsafe”, sure as hell will make it easier to get through.

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