Birdpen - On Off Safety Danger (2009)

Genre : Indie,Rock,Alternative DAVE PEN OF ARCHIVE!!
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Tracklist

01. breaking precedent
02. airspace
03. off
04. machines live like ordinary people
05. man on fire
06. the ghost bird
07. admiral red
08. slow
09. the birds and the antennas
10. thorns
11. cold blood

Who are BirdPen? aka What happens when I press this button?

Not everyone enjoys driving headfirst at speed into a brick wall to test out the airbag of a stolen vehicle. That is because there is a voice somewhere inside, a survival instinct is what some call it, and its main interest is protecting us from danger and delivering us from evil.

The survival instinct warns us not to do things and go places we shouldn’t, it wants us to live and remain unblemished, but despite all its fine arguments very occasionally that side of our character loses out and we do something that puts our situation in jeopardy. When this happens, when the survival instinct has been overridden by some jackass notion that it’ll be okay to drive into the wall at high speed and that might even be FUN, the survival instinct has to watch on helpless with the rest of its selves to see what will manifest as forces beyond its control determine whether on this occasion it will have future opportunity to worry, or not.

To my mind, BirdPen on their debut album On/Off/Safety/Danger (released October 2008) represent the sound of the survival instinct right before the whole shit comes crashing down and everything changes irreparably forever. Soothing, raging, always caring On/Off/Safety/Danger is acting out beyond the states of insecurity, paranoia and fear. They are dealing with dark forces and step up close to the void and look directly into the great abyss for all of humankind, and for the sheer hell of it.

“BirdPen write songs that even on first hearing you feel you know. They’ve got a great rapport with a live audience, and they know how to work a crowd; a breath of fresh air.” BBC 6 Music

The Birdpen world is one where animals are hunted, butchered or got rid of because they are a nuisance or interfere with human progress – whatever human progress is? Computers, monsters, machines and mayhem. We are shitting in our own bed and we’re not really enjoying the smell. Birdpen understand this and they understand that we now share a planet with strangers who will happily fly planes into buildings full of people without a seconds thought for their own life or anyone else’s. Birdpen see a swirling world spinning on money, lies, corruption, hypocrisy and greed, where contradictions and ironies abound. Theirs is a planet where all creations and beauty is overshadowed by everything that is savagely destroyed and killed, and for what? BirdPen exist on the perimeters of a destructive world they do not feel a part of. They are on the outside reporting back to us exactly what they see.