Ten years in the making, ‘This Monologue Conversation’ could easily have become the album that got away. Instead, I Plead Irony return with a third record that feels richer for everything it survived.
Rauf Jordan, Paul McDonald and Lawrence Arnold have been making music together in one form or another for more than two decades, and that history gives the album a tremendous sense of chemistry. The songs feel instinctive without sounding careless, with riffs, rhythms and vocal ideas landing like the product of musicians who know exactly how to push one another.
Tracks like ‘Inside the Lines’ takes personal restriction and open it into something much broader, while ‘History’ wrestles with the uncomfortable possibility that progress is never as secure as people like to believe.
Crucially, though, ‘This Monologue Conversation’ never gets trapped in gloom. The band’s alt-rock core is full of movement, with punk energy, bluesier edges and a live-wire looseness that keeps the record surging forward. Even at its darkest, there’s a real sense of three friends reconnecting through the sheer pleasure of making music together.
It’s an angle that makes ‘Falling Upwards’ a brilliant way to close. The track brings a flash of hope without forcing an easy resolution, suggesting that sometimes connection can pull you somewhere better before you have even realised the direction has changed.
There’s something wonderfully fitting about an album so fascinated by contradiction finally emerging from such a fractured history. It almost disappeared, yet arrives sounding focused. It spent years unfinished, yet feels complete.
Bold, thoughtful and packed with personality, ‘This Monologue Conversation’ is the sound of a band rediscovering exactly why they were worth waiting for.
