Flogging Molly
Within a Mile of Home

THE REVIEW

1993: Dave King, a Dubliner transplanted to Los Angeles with a past as the frontman of the heavy/hair metal band Fastway of ex-Motorhead's Eddie Clarke, has the opportunity of a lifetime: a record contract with Epic Records. King is determined to take his artistic journey in a new direction, blending his hard/heavy heritage with the thriving folk punk tradition of his native Ireland. The project, partly tested by the Pogues, is undoubtedly interesting, but the major, demonstrating formidable short-sightedness and lack of backbone, doesn't even consider it.

It's essentially from this rejection that the Flogging Molly are born: Dave King isn't one to easily give up, and together with his future wife Bridget Regan and other unknown musicians, he starts again from a pub in Los Angeles, Molly's Malone, managing after a few years to secure a contract with SideOneDummy Records. Considering their independent status and a music market oriented toward completely different kinds of sounds, Flogging Molly achieves considerable success, managing to reach high positions even in mainstream charts like the Billboard Top 200. Listening to albums like this “Within A Mile Of Home” from 2004, one gets a sense of the enormous proportions of the blunder made by the heads at Epic.

“Within A Mile Of Home” is the classic album worth a greatest hits on its own: fiddle, flutes, banjo, and mandolin perfectly integrate with electric guitars, creating booming Celtic punk anthems, the cheerful and ironic “Screaming At The Wailing Wall”, the relentless crescendo of “To Youth (My Sweet Roisin Dubh)”, featured in the FIFA 2005 soundtrack, and the raucous “Tomorrow Comes A Day Too Soon”, with its beautiful acoustic intro “The Wrong Company”, in addition to exhilarating pirate dances like “Seven Deadly Sins”, “Queen Anne’s Revenge”, and the more complex “Tobacco Island”, and epic concert anthems, “Within A Mile Of Home” and “Light Of A Fading Star”, where Dave King shines, showcasing his ancient heritage with vocal performances whose tone and style almost recall the best Ronnie James Dio. However, this album isn't just about energy and immediacy; the pace often slows in ballads like “Factory Girl”, bittersweet and semi-acoustic, with a vaguely retro atmosphere, and the most Irish track on the album, the majestic and sorrowful “Whistles The Wind”, up to the unexpected closure, “Don’t Let Me Die Still Wondering”, a masterful power ballad dedicated to Johnny Cash, supported by Bridget Regan's fiddle and a formidable Dave King, sealing an in practically perfect album in grand style; energetic and catchy but without ingratiation, easy and immediate but timeless, derivative, of course, perhaps even already heard and certainly indebted to the Pogues, but not lacking its own identity: in other words, a great album: true, sincere, vibrant, always capable of evoking emotions.