Although the album, “God Forgive These Bastards‰” Songs From the Forgotten Life of Henry Turner contains some of The Taxpayers most popular song, the album as a whole doesn‰’t sound like it should ever be appealing to anyone. Abrasively loud and chaotic songs such as “Atlanta‰’s Own‰” which seem to change genre on a dime intermingle with catchy and slightly upbeat tunes such as “Hungry Dog in the Street‰” and songs with lyrics that make you shiver such as “The Carriage Town Clinic‰” which describes a state mental institution from the point of view of a patient.

Leave it to a folk punk band to write an album about living in squalor and bad things happening to people to who play sports. The entire album is the story of a man named Henry Turner, a once-college-baseball-star who suffered an injury in his prime and fell into a life of squalor. Henry Turner is the fictional great-grandson of real confederate soldier and congressman, Henry Gray Turner. The album does not specifically state this, but the companion book to the album apparently does. Excuse me while I add it to my amazon wishlist. The Inside of the book jacket reads “Henry Turner went from being a local hero and star pitcher of the Georgia Tech Wildcats to an abusive, alcoholic drifter. After spending his later years in homeless encampments and psych wards, Turner turned his demons to his advantage and became a kind, beloved street story-teller, a friend of the down-and-out, and a public transit angel.” and it pretty much describes the gist of the album. If you‰’re interested in reading the book, you can get it  here.

I like this album specifically because it does what a lot of music in this genre just doesn‰’t do, which is attempt art. Most folk punk bands are content to just yell into their microphones about how upset they are about this or that but, for this album, The Taxpayers made a real go at making something which required some interpretation and left room for some discussion. Rob Morton sat down and thought up this story and wrote this book when, to be successful in his genre, he really didn‰’t mean to.

Perhaps he just really wanted to tell the story of a homeless man to humanize a class of people that may actively try not to think about, and it‰’s likely that he didn‰’t want to sugar coat the story at all and wrote it as graphically and as realistically as he could. But, if that was the case, why include the outlandish and unlikely part of the story where Henry Turner is a star baseball player for Georgia Tech? Why even place the story in Georgia when the band is based in Portland, Oregon? It‰’s arguable that The Taxpayers wanted to use this specific location and activity to show the degenerative nature of American, and specifically Southern, culture. The album shows how, with his entire life being focused on sports, Henry found himself with no other marketable skills after his injury. It also makes specific efforts to describe the squalor of the once prosperous rust belt communities in the midwest in the song “Goddamn These Hands of Mine‰Û. Many songs on the album are either focused on how great the days of the past were, or how bad the days of the present and the days of the future seem.

The album ends with a sort of upbeat tune playing in the background of an interview with a man who claims to have known Henry Turner in his childhood. This man has lived his life pretty independently of Henry Turner‰’s out of control spiral of doom and depression. The man doesn‰’t hate Henry, but does admit that he was kind of a jerk. The inclusion of the interview does something for the end of the album in making it seem more optimistic, but after a few listens and some thought really just tells you how little effect Henry Turner, the star of the whole album, had on this man, and most of the world. It‰’s a very nihilistic and self-deprecating idea. “Don‰’t get too cocky,‰” the folk punk band says to the homeless mental patient.