Album Review: Every Bad by Porridge

“Full of love and full of sadness”, the Mercury Prize-nominated Porridge Radio want to talk about it.

Artwork by Issie Wan

Dana Margolin, lead singer of Porridge Radio, is “talking to you”. Shortlisted for the 2020 Mercury Prize, the band’s latest album Every Bad continues an intimate dialogue with the listener that has been there throughout their work. Rarely is anyone outside of the listener or Margolin invoked. Seldom even are contexts discussed or the world outside of this relationship acknowledged: it is just you and Margolin communicating in a kind of void. We can’t talk back to Margolin, but there is a dialogue. Opinions are expressed and then opposed. Different voices communicating are conveyed despite Margolin never prefacing anything with a “you say:” or changing her delivery. All the voices have been internalised (if they were ever external); they are delivered sincerely and without judgement. Sometimes Margolin is the one “to tell you that it’s all ok”, sometimes “the one who has to be told that it’s all ok”.

Often this communication is strained. Concerns about how well these voices understand one another recur; some voices bark like dogs, and not being heard is feared and lamented. Enjambment multiplies the implications of paired statements. Which of the voices will win out at any one time – or for good – is a recurring question. Song titles include “Born Confused”, “Don’t Ask Me Twice” (else you might get another answer) and “Give/Take”. Margolin is undecided, but, we’re certain, is intensely engaged in deciding.

This intimacy is compounded by a sense that Margolin is confiding in you her hope of improving things and her demands that you involve yourself with this effort. Margolin isn’t “anything unforgivable”, enabling these confessions.

I want us to get better,

I want us to be kinder,

To ourselves and to each other.

The songs are preoccupied with what Margolin and the listener should do: how they can help themselves. Ideas of self-help and aphorisms pervade the lyrics: “If your body is not well then your mind cannot be clear”. This preoccupation seems simultaneously a sendup of popular ideas, and an affirmation of self-help’s importance. Self-help is a common interest of lyricists at the moment, including Julia Jacklin, as well as Florist, who sings, joltingly, of trying to find “secrets from the last time you felt alright.”

Margolin’s manic repetition of “I’m kind” on “Lilac” seems a self-help practice of affirmation, but it is also like an intrusive thought, or a device to draw attention away from something unpleasant. Frantic repetition conjures up all of these ideas, and this is key to the music. The songs often feel composed of blocks: separate at first, and then incessantly repeated in different orders, speeding up and intermingling as they build to maniacal crescendos. I suspect that this repetition makes it easier to listen to Every Bad, and its component songs, again and again. 

Despite those self-help practices, sometimes things are too critically negative to be building towards the ideal life: “There’s a hundred million different kinds of ways to be ok, but I don’t know a single one of them today”. Frequently, as on the deep blue cover of Every Bad and the music video for Lilac, the sea is invoked in these times of crisis. “The waves keep rolling in,” and Margolin “goes inside the sea sometimes”. On “Nephews”, Margolin imagines such submersion as travelling “to a place where your mind will decay, and you slip into unconsciousness”, similar to the numbing insulation depicted in Florist’s song “Still”. At other times the immersion feels like an engagement with feeling; while lines like “until I’m knee deep in water, I can’t breathe” and “the beauty seeps in the cracks where the pain comes in” suggest dark temptation. 

Although the lyrics address darkness they confront it with toughness and a sense of humour, and the music is broadly upbeat. After “I want to make you comfortable”, there is an audible Morrissey-esque eye roll accompanying “I know you’re so uncomfortable”. The Smiths also combined dark lyrics and light guitars, brought closer together through humour; but whilst Morrissey could be supercilious, ideological, fatalistic, and separate, Margolin is democratic, specific, optimistic, and engaged. Whilst Morrissey could be pompous, for Margolin, “everything is way more boring than it seems”.

If you want to try them out, playing Every Bad in order is surely the place to start with Porridge Radio – if that goes well, try out their first album and deeper cuts like “Losercore”.