Frank Turner – ‘Positive Songs for Negative People’

It’s been a long road for Frank Turner. But, despite the 10 years, eight albums and more than 1700 shows since he left punk rock and picked up an acoustic guitar, his sixth studio album, Positive Songs for Negative People, suggests that even though he might not always know exactly where he’s going, he’s still very aware of where he’s been.

While most of Turner’s albums have a pretty central theme, Positive Songs seems to stumble from idea to idea at times. While, at its core, it’s an album about getting better after the events that inspired Tape Deck Heart – Frank’s 2013 release detailing a recent break up – Positive Songs opens with Turner’s resolve to start again, and the first three songs tend to stick to that idea. After a brief nod to Tape Deck Heart’s ‘The Fisher King Blues’, we’re dragged screaming through the album’s anthemic follow-ups, ‘Get Better’ and ‘The Next Storm’, continuing Turner’s long-standing tradition of getting a running start at an album.

‘Glorious You’ takes a break just to deliver a musical hug to a friend.

After that, though, the songs seem to wander – ‘The Opening Act of Spring’ is an apology to the subject of the previous album, which happens to be where the more muted, love-sick ‘Mittens’ feels like it belongs, despite being one of the highlights of Positive Songs. ‘Glorious You’ takes a break just to deliver a musical hug to a friend. It’s not until the second half of the album that it seems to find its true calling, which seems to be more about the writer’s age, and mortality in general, than about getting over a break up. ‘Demons’ might declare that “It’s great to be alive”, but the instruction of the previous song, “When you meet Death, be out of breath”, suggests little other than a preoccupation with what happens when we shuffle off this mortal coil. Despite its humble subject matter, the album rushes on, offering up Frank’s patented mix of folk rock and his punk rock sense of honesty that form the core of his most popular songs, until a drastic change of pace brings the whole party screeching to a halt.

‘Silent Key’, the album’s penultimate song, is the imagined final 2 minutes and 45 seconds of the life of Christa McAuliffe, a primary school teacher killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. It’s lyrically clumsy, and far from being the album’s high point, but it does a wonderful job of paving the way for the devastating ‘Song for Josh’. Frank’s tribute to his friend Josh Burdette, a security guard at Washington’s 9:30 Club, who committed suicide in 2013, is the singer-songwriter stripped back to his alarmingly honest best. Recorded live at the club, it packs the same crippling emotional punch of classics ‘Jet Lag’ and ‘Long Live the Queen’, and is a welcome respite from an album that occasionally seems to trip itself up in its own rampant sense of excitement.

An album that occasionally seems to trip itself up in its own rampant sense of excitement.

Positive Songs for Negative People doesn’t show him at his best, but remains classic Frank Turner, showing off his ability to have you jumping around the room one minute and quietly sobbing the next. But as well as being classic Frank Turner, it shows it off as well: parallels are drawn with ‘The Ballad of Me and My Friends’, ‘Try This at Home’ and ‘The Fastest Way Back Home’, not just with a few choice pieces from Tape Deck Heart. Positive Songs may not have the same sense of purpose as some of his other albums, feeling a lot like a stop on the way to something bigger, but it still has plenty to enjoy.