Billy Bragg

Billy Bragg usually strove to strike a balance between populist politics and the affairs of the heart on his best albums (such as Brewing Up with Billy Bragg and Talking with the Taxman About Poetry), but with his 1990 EP, The Internationale, Bragg set aside the notion of balance for the day and recorded seven explicitly political numbers. The material ranges from the openly patriotic (a lovely version of William Blake's "Jerusalem," which Bragg has championed as a candidate for the English national anthem) to the pained and bitter (Eric Bogle's heart-wrenching "My Youngest Son Came Home Today") and the satirically humorous (the anti-capitalist "The Marching Song of the Covert Battalions"), though the latter is the only new-from-the-ground-up song on the EP ("The Internationale" does feature new lyrics from Bragg and "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night" rewrites Earl Robinson's famous tune about Joe Hill). Bragg is clearly putting his heart and soul into all these songs, but there's a certain stiffness to "The Internationale" and "The Red Flag" that he isn't able to shake off, and "Nicaragua Nicaraguita" is in serious need of a translation, since Bragg's passionate bellow all but swallows up whatever meaning it may have in Spanish. Yep Roc's 2006 reissue of The Internationale adds weight to the package with the addition of the 1988 Live and Dubious EP, which includes six more numbers reflecting Bragg's leftist beliefs, among them a revised version of "Days Like These" (reflecting American political concerns) and covers of "Think Again" and "Chile Your Waters Run Red Through Soweto." The energy of Bragg's live performances communicates well on plastic, though the street-level rabble-rousing of "To Have and to Have Not" is more than welcome after the somber numbers that precede it. Five more bonus tracks fill out the CD, most of them covers (among them a fine reading of Phil Ochs' "Joe Hill," an Anglicized take on "This Land Is Your Land," and Sam Cooke's beautiful "A Change Is Gonna Come") and one rare Bragg composition, the appropriate "Never Cross a Picket Line." Finally, the package features a bonus DVD of Bragg live in concert. Bragg plays a 45-minute set at a rock festival in Lithuania in 1988 (the performance is great but the sound and image are uneven, and hearing Bragg deliver between-song patter through an interpreter gets old fast), as well as two numbers from a 1986 festival of political song in East Berlin and another from a tour of Nicaragua. Yep Roc gets high marks for the thoroughness of this release, but if you prefer Bragg's songs about love and life in England over his polemic material, you might want to give this package a pass. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide