Pagan Wanderer Lu – Fight My Battles For Me

Pagan Wanderer Lu - Fight My Battles For Me

A cursory glance at Pagan Wanderer Lu’s Last.fm page is most revealing, it seems. The comments box is dotted with wayward metal fans who have evidently been waylaid by the presence of ‘Pagan’ in the name. When an Eastern European black metal fan leaves you a comment saying simply “weird”, you’re probably doing something which qualifies as right, under the correct circumstances.

That said, I don’t know if ‘weird’ is the right terminology for Fight My Battles For Me, a ramshackle collection of bedroom lo-fi in the truest sense of the word. It’s not something I’d listen to readily, but something ‘weird’ wouldn’t feature songs you could happily whistle along to whilst you go about your daily doings. Would it?

I think the point we’ve reached is that where it becomes clear that weird, like it’s estranged cousin beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder. So maybe we’re best settling with odd as a word to describe Andy Regan’s latest stitched together album. ‘The Gentleman’s Game’ juxtaposes angry shouted swear word choruses and the wonderful opening line “Matthew’s bleeding from his mouth”, whilst ‘Good Christian/Bad Christian’ takes a Public Enemy/Dalek style sample of a raging preacher and overlays it with a bent keyboard riff and wry observations about religion.

And whilst the oddpop mix might not be to my tastes, there’s something admirable about Pagan Wander Lu’s take on the one man band. It’s DIY and lo-fi in a pleasant way; not full of jarring angry feedback or tape hiss, and instead sounds like a man recording in his bedroom and trying to make the record sound as good as possible. And if that approach occasionally leaves the recordings feeling a little rough around the edges and overly laden with cheap sounding casios, then so be it.

But the problem is that there’s only so much cheap Casio I can take at once, and in truth, it all does wash over me. More’s the shame, given some of the delightful lyrical twists and turns Regan pulls off. A line like “I am friends with everyone you’re friends with on the internet…I can’t believe we never met” is the kind of thing that on paper sounds terrible, but when gently lilted it raises a wry smile. Similarly ‘The Memorial Hall’ is wrought tight with clever lyrical asides but unfortunately, the circus nature of the music somewhat spoils the effect.

When Pagan Wanderer Lu’s bubbling lyricism and dense instrumentation does work, it works wonderfully it must be said. Whilst the intro to ‘Ten Cities Is Not A European Tour’ might for some reason make me think of Bran Van 3000’s ‘Drinking In LA’ (I really have no idea why), it has a mournful melancholy to it, and it builds into a glitch maelstrom most admirably. Equally, ‘The Tree of Knowledge”s initial rondo a cappella layering might irritate, but the end product is satisfying in its simplicity (especially the delightful chorus line, which I won’t spoil here).

My personal problem with the album is that it seems to attempt to be odd for the sake of oddness slightly too often. Granted it’s not the kind of thing I’d find myself listening to very often, but there’s a feeling that sometimes, Pagan Wanderer Lu might be better received by my ears if he wandered a little less and kept things somewhat simpler, allowing his delightful lyrics to win me over.

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