Foreign BeggarsYes. Look, this is fine. It's fun, and loud, and engaging. Fine. But it begs the question: if you won Best New Act in 2004 and you deliver an album like 2 2 Karma in 2018, are you doing enough?
A difficulty pulses through this record. Foreign Beggars' politics are on point: Kaepernick good, All Lives Matters bad, MLK great, peace ideal. Fair enough, but we learn many of these things on a track that opens with the radically tone-deaf line, "I could give a fuck about an honest day's work." Clumsiness and conspiracy theories populate the album. Visitations is particularly tin foil-fueled. Fighting "the system" is good, and necessary. But if you're clouding the truth with paranoid ravings about chemtrails, you're actually part of the problem. You're the reason the president was elected. Not the sort of misstep you should be making a couple of decades in the game.
Toast is energetic and compelling. Vultures is a toe-tapper. Waved is a genuine monster party jam. But it's tough to escape the feeling that these guys should know better than to spread Trump fuel around. The songs are ok, but we need better from our public figures.
