Rock 'n' Roll -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent," wrote Jacques Barzun in his history of the western world, "From Dawn to Decadence." "The term is not a slur; it is a technical label. A decadent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist ..."

Popular music culture in both England and America has been decadent according to this description for a couple of decades now; indeed, pop culture treats the term as a desirable attribute. Futility has been the main lyric content from the punk era through grunge and beyond, and nothing could be as comically absurd as the direction hip hop has taken since it went from being the cinema verite of the 1970s to the gangsta fashion fantasy world of the 1990s and beyond. Weird Al Yankovic may never be compared with Erasmus, but it's conceivable that Bob Dylan will.

Rock and roll certainly didn't start out this way. It was an escape from futility, an expression of youthful joy and a platform for positive thinking. The ideals expressed -- trust, love, brotherhood, the celebration of simple enjoyments -- were real and achievable.

There is one place on earth where rock and roll still flourishes in this form -- Ireland. The stature U2 enjoys as the undisputed greatest rock band in the world reflects the fact that the band actually takes stands this far into its career. Bono can parody the decadent rock star on a tour, then turn around and form an organization to deal with Third World debt.

The Saw Doctors are the best example of Irish rock and roll's ability to embody the music's best original intentions. Their very isolation in Western Ireland has been one of the band's strengths, keeping them free from the sense of star-system privilege that accompanies decadent pop and giving them a paradisiacal landscape to write about.

The band's first song "N17" was a simple but extremely powerful anthemic celebration of a rural highway that connects the northern and southern parts of western Ireland. The sing along line "I wish I was on the N-17, stone walls and the grass is green" offers no revelations, it's simply a statement of regional pride and joy, but when you see a crowd of 5,000 people, most of whom have never been to the west of Ireland, singing it at the top of their lungs it's impossible to deny its power.

Like great rock and roll bands from Humble Pie to ACDC, the Saw Doctors revel in simplicity. The melodies of the songs are solid and easy to sing, especially the choruses, but they're all infused with the sprightly touch of Irish traditional music, which gives them a numinous, breathing spirit. The rhythm section is straight ahead roots rock, informed by the skip step of ska and the energy of punk.

On the more up-tempo numbers the rhythm section carries the band and the lead lines, taken in equal parts from rock and roll and traditional Irish dance bands, are woven in rhythmically. The ballads are the most typically Irish of their songs, written about the day-to-day pleasures and pains of small town life in the countryside.

"Villains?" the latest Saw Doctors release, reminds me of the way "Revolver" sounded in the succession of Beatles albums between "Rubber Soul" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." There are a lot more musical elements brought into play on this album, including horn sections and electronic effects, but the band's root sound is carried over effectively.

The title track is a whole new direction for the group, textured contemporary rock with a treated electric guitar way up in the mix, an electronically altered vocal and lyrics that reflect the trouble of urban life. The Saw Doctors see themselves in the midst of all this confusion: "The band up playing on the stage/ teenage songs in middle age/ while the young lads burn their bass guitars/ and the big boys lick their credit cards."

If they're worried about it's all forgotten by the second song, "This Is Me," with its sing-along chorus: "This is me bein' me, it's just the way I am." The beautiful ballads "Still Afraid of the Dark," "Happy Days" "I Know I've Got Your Love" and "Still the Only One" are reminiscent of the band's earlier work, and they still indulge in nature worship on the whimsical "Always Gives Me More."

"DarkWind" evokes a more somber tone and shows the band developing a longer-range perspective on life, a mood broken up with almost apologetic comic relief on the pub-love-gone-wrong tale "Chips."

The band's growth is particularly apparent on "Bound to the Peace," a song inspired by the civil strife in Ireland but with obvious implications in the Middle East and the world at large. The song begins on a pessimistic note: "Sometimes it seems there's no solution ... Some things are best left unsaid," but the sense of purpose overcomes the sense of futility as the emotion builds to the chorus "I'm bound to the peace," as if tied to the mast, determined not to let a bloody past be the only path to the future.

Late in the song comes this simple but powerfully effective line, a summation of the attitude needed to combat the sense of futility: "What good is being forgiven if you can't forgive yourself?"