Mega Bog – End of Everything
Mega Bog brings some new wave sparkle to the end of days
Forged in the landscape of lockdown, climate collapse and, for Mega Bog bandleader and LA resident Erin Birgy, a journey towards sobriety at the edge of record-breaking forest fires, on paper End of Everything sets out as a record pitched at the highest possible stakes. However, as personal reckonings set against visions of catastrophe and environmental apocalypse go, it isn’t half good fun.
There’s a slinky, new wave pout to the excellent The Clown, and Don’t Doom Me Now has an almost New-Romantic theatricality; Birgy’s belted, emotive vocals keeping the record a long way from any accusation of archness. It all leads to the first half of the record achieving a wonderful balancing act of emotional severity and technicolor fun. The synths that underpin Love Is could almost be off an 80s Van Halen record, but they’re shorn of their world-conquering confidence, and in the process become something infinitely more emotionally precarious.
It’s a shame that the latter half of the record doesn’t quite maintain that balance. The grandstanding of All and Everything rather overpowers the record in a way that it never quite recovers from. The following pair of songs, without the hooks or giddy charm of the earlier ones, are left to circle the blown out space it has left behind. That said, the windswept balladry of closer End of Everything really showcases Birgy’s superb voice and closes out the record in fine fashion.
It’s not a record you can fault for ambition; it firmly sets its sights on the kind of perfectly formed epoch capturing record that sets the world alight. But when all is said and done End of Everything is scrappier than that – a selection of often very solid songs that waivers a touch towards its back end, but nonetheless marks another solid entry to the output of an always interesting artist.
Listen to: The Clown, Love Is, Don’t Doom Me Now