Madadkin’s seventh album begins with a seemingly last desperate call (Blast Off Superman) to fix the mess where all in now. The music is satirical and even absurd (aren’t we beyond hope now?), the Übermensch is as much a fantasy as any other Superman or supernatural saviour. And so we slip into the second track: Where you gonna run? A tired, cracked, wavering voice, over a still ridiculous soundtrack, expressing a hopelessness: with climate disaster collapse is everywhere. There will be no escape.

The title of the album should actually be Songs for the end of our civilisation, but we decided on the more compact concept of Age for the sake of brevity. Of course, a reference to T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland seemed perfectly fitting for this end of the age mentality and so we recruited the dead poet himself to announce Fear in a handful of dust now perfectly jazzy, with a duet between clarinet and bassoon.

The jazz softens into a bluesy acoustic guitar theme, and a dialogue between hope and despair in Free World, followed by the nostalgic We will be us again, lamenting our deception.

Then jazz again in Avian Flu, a manically playful dedication to Charlie Parker, with a desperate, anguished vocal chop of noise more than words. The first sign of the end of civilisation is the general collapse into meaningless gibberish.

Nostalgia perhaps, inspired the resurrection of two old themes from the P.D. Adkin era, and we’ve remixed Talkin’ to the Train and The Poet is Dead. Nevertheless, both songs capture the End of an Age feelings of despair and a growing decadence, and a decadence that causes growing despair. The Poet is Dead was a song dedicated to Leonard Cohen, written just after his death.

In the middle of the album is Just got back from Leipzig, an exaggeratedly slow basso continuo to accompany a simple and brief eight-line verse that is repeated (and sung) over and over again, seemingly endlessly. This piece represents the heart of the end-of-civilisation theme of the album. Full of a melancholy longing and desperation, it groans on towards the end, much like T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men, with a whimper.

Melting Snow blasts out of the Leipzig minimalism with a Moby inspired, pseudo-dance beat. A resurrection? After the collapse and decadence preceding it, it is certainly a welcome touch of optimism (albeit rather nostalgic).

You were the boss has a thumping acoustic blues guitar theme that lays a bitter bed

for the rasping, acrimonious lyrics to rest in. It’s a song about exploitation and

the (future) revenge of the exploited that will come after the collapse.

I wanna be a bird is an absurd song, built over some staccato dubstep,

it sings of a desire to be a bird (harking back to the Superman at the

album’s point of departure). In the context, it should be taken as a

desire for the need for a trans-humanist evolution.

Thou shalt not have guns: thematically this song should have

been in the first part of the album, criticising the current

plague in our decadent civilisation of gun ownership. It’s a

rocky song, quite different to the rest of the album.

The final song, Then came the end, is an anthem for the

end of civilisation. Dramatic, soaring, it is the

culminating climax of this album that should not be

missed.