Ted Leo and the Pharmacists: "Bottled in Cork"

As a high schooler just growing out of Anti-Flag, Ted Leo was thrilling in how he channeled political punk’s nostalgia and feeling of counter-cultural unity into something older, smarter, and more abstract (less Chomsky-for-crusties). If I didn’t understand half his analogies or references, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt—he didn’t have a posse of peers to lean on, after all, just essential riffs and believable authenticity; here was a survivor, living life to its fullest, giddy as a teenager. And then the way Living With The Living (2007) used the same template he always used but without those intangibles—the catchiness, the rootedness—this proved how precarious and impressive Ted Leo could be when all of his ambitions lined up, and how everyone had kind of taken him for granted (at least in my neck of the woods).

On “Bottled in Cork,” the pieces fall into place again, and maybe in the best way possible. “There was a resolution pending on the United Nations floor,” he begins, in a fake-out intro, topical and electric as usual. But then in the kind of slightly left-field turn that Leo (and the rest of his new The Brutalist Bricks) could use more often, acoustic guitar kicks in, kicking out any sign of angst-ridden wailing, welcoming a loosely connected panorama of tour happenings: a message from his sister, hanging out in Scandanavia, getting bottled in Cork.

“Me, I’m just a loner in a world full of kids / Egos and ids,” he sings, setting up a contrast to his sister’s new family. This is as good a mission statement as any for how he operates and why songs like “Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone” or “Me & Mia” stood out. His isn’t just any kind of nostalgia—this is photographic memory, comparable maybe only to the Wrens’ worldview in how it makes being an aging hipster sound like the most magic-yet-rigorous lifestyle imaginable. Leo refuses to compromise, and while it’s a lonely gig, in songs like these he’s able to articulate both the joys of a long memory and a kind of weary openness to what life still holds. When he finishes “Bottled In Cork” by repeating “tell the bartender I think I’m falling in love,” it’s like a plaintive flipside to the famous, layered ending of “Rude Boys,” pivoting from a rich history into a bleary, beautiful future.