I've always liked the self-confessed madman over the moons, but his solo albums in general have never fully stuck with me, being great but often scattershot. Here, though, it all came together in a way that I don't think even its creator envisaged, rhetoric to the contrary.
The big hype over the album was how it was an extended mood piece/discussion of Earth's precarious state of collapse, environmental and otherwise. If you read it like that, I guess you'll get a lot of out of it, and the sentiments expressed via the liner notes, if not always clearly in the lyrics, are very good grist for the argumentative mill (and the action mill from the looks of it, including pictures of Cope and his collective crew in poll-tax protests and talking about protesting the Gulf War as a small part of a massive demonstration in Paris, etc.).
But as I've said before, political and other viewpoints are fine things, but if the music sucks why care? And thankfully the music doesn't suck. Instead, with everything from poppy celebrations of live and love to wracked, often shredded psychosis-as-rock-freakout to greasy funk/blues and back again, it's as good an example of what happens when someone working in well-established parameters decides to actually breathe life into things long dead and codified. And that's what makes Peggy Suicide so affecting and effective; it's what happens when a vet of da bizness/da music/da everything actually decides to do something about it and make something worthy of the dry as dust hosannas rather than just being there.
So "Double Vegetation" may or may not really be about demonization of Islam in the mass media, but what it definitely does have is a quietly ominous build to the chorus and quite fine guitar heroics. "Safesurfer" may be about AIDS pandemic fears but coasts and drones and creeps out and along. "Drive, She Said" may be about London pollution but has Cope in full-on commanding rock singer mode and killer hooks to boot, "If You Loved Me At All"…well, this one doesn't have a Deep Thoughts message, but damn when the band fully kicks in if it doesn't hit the spot. And along and out until "Las Vegas Basement" gently closes the book on everything, and quite nicely too.
And so forth. So maybe there's an irony in the fact that creation of an album these days involves using electricity from dirty power sources and that pressing results into aluminum is just what happens whenever we plunder the earth's resources, etc. But hey, that's rock and roll. And the old cliché sometimes turns out to have a certain truth.