Poets wrote about my rights (four syllables each)

I would sound a battle cry
If I were not afraid to die

“The Last Bombed City” is the final track on the Indelicates’ debut album, American Demo. It is a World War I story, a straightforward first-person soldier’s ballad, but with assorted flash-forwards and bottomless crevices.

I slept in the mud all night
Shared with ra-a-a-gged boys
the pictures of our princesses
This is not the Roaring Twenties yet.

The song is a montage of propaganda, of “music halls filled up with wartime song,” plummy speeches from “gentlemen in wigs,” a patriotic cry of “God bless the warring nations/every soldier at his station!” — the narrator grown cynical (“The greatest war in history”/”That memory’s not ours; it isn’t mine”) but still repeating the words with a certain warmth and reverence. The song in general contains a blurry warmth, although the lyric, the raw piano backing, the intonations of Julia’s accent:

Hereafter, I’ll be a killer
And I’ll drink out my days in a century that’ll hate me forever

– are sniper-precise; nonetheless her subtle vocal gives him a flattered air, as if propaganda is the first praise and attention he’s ever received and he still, after all the chill of the trenches, finds it hard to resist.

The whole lyric pushes together and pulls apart at unexpected times. It’s definitely a strangely gendered creature, full of the androgyny of extreme youth. There’s one moment in which Julia, her voice overlaid with a murmuring susurrus, tells the narrator’s gang of beardless soldiers to

Lie back and think of England,
Lie back and think of England.

In her hands, this isn’t a broad joke. It is a joke, but it’s said with care and comes out plain, without bathos or hype. The drag vocal isn’t broad either. It’s vaudevillian, but played very straight, like Cait O’Riordan’s vocal on the Pogues’ “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day,” and to similar self-possessed effect.

I can’t help comparing “The Last Bombed City” to the Decemberists’ “The Soldiering Life.” Both are World War I stories, clever, campy, microcosmic, with a measure of what TV Tropes calls “Dissonant Serenity.” “The Last Bombed City” has an effect “The Soldiering Life” can’t match, though, a lasting ambiguity, a war fog.

That’s not even what the Decemberists are going for, I know. They just want to tell a story about a couple of soldiers in love, with some mood-play and verbal fun — and that’s the problem, and that’s my problem with the Decemberists as a whole. They spend a lot of time writing skillfully about historical and personal evils, but it always seems to be in the service of an artistic pose; there’s no obvious empathy with anyone involved, victims, aggressors, or enmeshed (relative) innocents. And my history with them is such that I feel a certain personal disloyalty running this kind of comparison, but the fact remains that I’m still waiting for anything they do to hit me like “Stars,” and I wouldn’t trust them with a Waco musical.

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