REVIEW – Mongol Horde – ‘Mongol Horde’

Ashley Bebbington reviews Mongol Horde’s self-titled release.

Lately, Frank Turner has achieved huge success with his folk solo project, Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls, after his hardcore punk outfit Million Dead disbanded back in 2005. On the back of headlining Wembley in 2012, his latest album, Tape Deck Heart, attracted critical acclaim, and contained his highest charting single to date, The Way I Tend to Be.

Now, nearly 10 years after Million Dead played their final show in Southampton, Turner returns to his hardcore roots with Mongol Horde’s self-titled debut.

Proceedings get underway with storming opener ‘Make Way‘, beginning with an ironic jazzy number before launching headfirst into a barrage of riffs, whilst Turner screams “Make way for the Mongol Horde/coming back to fuck you up.” The riffs, provided by Turner’s keyboardist Matt Nasir, are chunky enough to pillage an unsuspecting Mongolian settlement, and former Million Dead drummer Ben Dawson’s beats are every bit as forceful.

Singles ‘Tapeworm Uprising’ and ‘Casual Threats’ from Weekend Hardmen are retained, keeping up the album’s trend of punchy riffing and heavy drums. The band are without a bassist, but don’t seem any worse off for it; Mongol Horde still manage to make fast, exciting hardcore music.

Lyrically, Mongol Horde is excellent, as would be expected from Frank Turner. Instead of treading his usual stomping grounds of love, politics, and friendship, however, the lyrics here are wonderfully absurd. There’s no doubt that Mongol Horde are an angry band, but the topics they’re angry about are genuinely amusing, making the effort feel like satire. ‘Staff to Refund Counter’ is about being dissatisfied with a purchase and returning it to the store, the chorus punctuated by screams of “I want my money back,” whilst Winky Face: The Mark of a Moron takes aim at people who use emoticons, with Turner saying “basically if you can’t make your meaning plain with all the richness of the English language and you have to resort to cartoon faces made with punctuation marks, you’re a dick.”

The album’s closer, ‘Hey Judas‘, accuses John Lennon and Paul McCartney of using a time machine to travel back to the 1960s, having stolen all of their songs from somebody else. I could go on, but you’ll have to listen to it to appreciate how superbly silly it is.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is they’re satirising, but you get the feeling they’re satirising hardcore punk itself. Turner has previously sung about falling out of love with the genre in his solo efforts, and hearing him sing angry hardcore songs calling people who use emoticons morons, and Natalie Portman’s tapeworm leading an uprising and taking over the United Nations seems like a subtle dig at the genre so loved by angry twenty-somethings. But of course, it’s also possible these guys are in it just to play some heavy music for the fun of it; a lot of the choruses seem like they’d be good for a singalong in a live environment.

Even the band’s name, with its copious amount of umlauts, seems like a thinly veiled swipe at Mötley Crüe, who Turner took a not so thinly veiled swipe at on his recent song Good & Gone. Möngöl Hörde (we dropped all the previous umlauts because it was too copious for a 700 word article -Ed) have taken a genre that very often takes itself far too seriously, and created something very tongue-in-cheek and playful; on my first listen I actually found myself chuckling on occasion at how ridiculous it is.

Clocking in at just over half an hour, Mongol Horde is a short-but-sweet hardcore record, many of the songs lasting little more than a couple of minutes. It’s a full-blown assault on your eardrums, but one that you’ll want to hit replay on once its final notes ring out.

A Million Dead reunion may not be on the cards anytime soon, but fans of the band will find more than enough to enjoy here. Frank Turner fans that didn’t discover his music through his associations with punk rock may find the album a little abrasive, but hardcore punk has never been so fun.

Mongol Horde is out now, and is available via iTunes, Xtra Mile Recordings and Spotify. In support of the record, they will embark upon a 9 date tour across England and Scotland in June; tickets are available now.

8/10