Men at Arms 2023

Highly detailed and colourful, this account illustrates the struggle of Indonesian forces in their War of Independence against the Netherlands, following the surrender of occupying Japanese forces in 1945.

Within the earthy, baroque psychedelia of his 3rd album, Amok, Declan O’Donovan meditates on losing track of time. It’s a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with—”a pedestrian and profound thing to do,” as the Yukon songwriter puts it. Amok is hardly a linear narrative, though, with a beginning, middle, and end; the album and the characters who populate it twist and pull time, fall out of it and into it, find themselves transformed by it. Songs go off the rails and expand themselves defiantly as O’Donovan inhabits their narrators—a hospital patient; a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story; people trapped on sinking ships or floating in space with satellites and dark matter.