Pogue Mahone
(Gaelic for "kiss my arse") is the seventh and final studio album from lauded
progressive
Irish folk
pioneers
the Pogues
. After the departure of
Shane MacGowan
, co-founder
Spider Stacy
found himself at the helm, singing and sharing songwriting duties with the rest of the group. If their post-
MacGowan
debut,
Waiting for Herb
, was a respectable attempt at recapturing the shape-shifting, genre-splitting days of classic tracks like
"Fiesta,"
"Lorelei,"
and
"Night Train to Lorca,"
is a celebration of the band's inception. Panned by critics and fans who refused to take a "
Shane
-less"
Pogues
seriously, both records are a testament to the band's enormous vault of talent.
Stacy
, who spent most of his career in
's shadow, rose to the occasion on
Herb
, offering up what must have been years of oppressed material, most of it remarkable. This time around it's the rest of the group that gets a shot at emptying their catalogs. In fact,
Mahone
is actually multi-instrumentalist
Jem Finer
and drummer
Andrew Ranken
's baby. For the most part they succeed in re-installing the
traditional
spark that made the group so electrifying in the '80s.
Pub rockers
like
Finer
's
"Bright Lights"
Ranken
's French rave-up
"Amadie,"
while suffering from murky production, are rousing, raucous, and delightful, making one wonder what the public's reaction would have been had
been a debut from a band nobody had ever heard of. [In 2005,
WEA International
reissued a re-mastered and expanded version of
with the the bonus tracks
"'Eyes Of An Angel"
and a previously unreleased mix of
"Love You Till The End."
] ~ James Christopher Monger