Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

The band Flogging Molly has been collaborating since 1997 and has since produced four full length albums under the SideOneDummy record label along with a handful of live and compilation albums. While Flogging Molly started off as a too-hard-to-categorize band, in today’s mishmash of musical genres, they have definitely found their place in appreciated music.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here; Flogging Molly’s latest album Float is great. Whether you’re a die hard fan or you’re new to their Punk Rock meets traditional Irish music there’s a good chance you’ll be an admirer of Float.

Like Flogging Molly’s previous albums, Float consists of a mixture of songs ranging from punk rock tracks like Paddy’s Lament with a hard hitting message about letting the dead be dead, to the more introspective songs like The Story So Far which deals with the realization that life’s tough but at least you’re alive. Granted their music is generally most marketable to angst-y teens and the cool crowd of 20 and 30-somethings, there’s still something in Float that I feel might appeal to more adults than their previous endeavors which largely only attracted kids in black leather jackets.

Many of the tracks such as You Won’t Make a Fool Out of Me continue to appeal to that rebellious punk kid that lives within all of us that just yearns to yell out to ‘the man’: “NO! No, no, you won’t, you won’t make a fool out of me!” But where the soul of the whole album lies is in the track Float which is a song about keeping yourself above the water when you feel like life is pulling you down. The track starts off with a reflective account of how a man’s life has been full of bad luck and booze when suddenly the violin picks up and the message changes from hopelessness to the realization that the man must pick up the pieces and keep moving along. It’s really a great song, both lyrically and instrumentally and I can’t imagine anyone with taste not loving it or at very least enjoying it.

All in all, Float is a great punk rock slash Irish album. If you’re new to Flogging Molly and you’re wondering if you’d like their style of music, this is possibly their best album thus far and you should give it a chance. And if you’ve been a fan since day one, Float will definitely not disappoint you; its style fits in Flogging Molly’s seemingly self-made genre and I’d go as far as to say that Float tops a lot of their recent work. It’s definitely an album worth picking up.