The Warrior's Code

The first twenty seconds of the first song are a hushed and soft Irish ballad before crudely being interrupted by hardstyle punk with the same Irish flavour. This is a great way to start this album for two reasons (1) It accentuates how rough-edged and crude this whole album is going to be, Irishmen will be shouting in your ear and you'll get used to it and (2) The Murphys are proud to be Irish to the bone, they're not dropping an ounce of style or Irish energy in favour of a more conventional ... read more

Terrible vocals and the instrumentation sucks. While I would respect some of the experimentation with the bagpipes and such, it does not work with punk rock, or at least they are bad at combining those.

An example of combining rock and bagpipes would be Korn's Shoots and Ladders and Dead. The bagpipes on those songs feel emotional and powerful, while on here they feel like a gimmick.

Dropkick Murphys are the musical equivalent of that one dope who brags about having Irish ancestry and makes it their entire personality. I do really enjoy hearing Celtic influence within music, for the record. There are plenty of great examples of bands from Ireland who implement Celtic influence into their sound seamlessly, such as The Cranberries or Thin Lizzy. There are even bands outside of Ireland I would say succeed at that, including other Celtic Punk leaning groups such as The ... read more

Listening to this is like taking a shamrock to your crown jewels, it is just unabashedly in-your-face Irish. Given that fact I thought it'd be the perfect album to listen to on St. Patrick's Day, and I think I was correct in that assumption. The band manages to rework traditional Celtic melodies into a more punk style, it's very catchy and a lot of fun if not a tad bit cheesy. As a whole it's definitely a bit of a gimmicky release, especially because it's at 100% for ... read more