By Will McGuirk

It's interesting that an artist who has the chops to go easily into big arena rockers chooses instead to pull back to retreat to go small and slow and in the process lose nothing in his art. That's this new album ‘My Second Last Album’, by Bahamas aka Afie Jurvanen. Instead of going loud he chooses quiet. And he states from the beginning over some yacht rock vibes or should we stay dory rock as he’s on the East Coast now, (he channels some Joel Plaskett by way of Stan Rogers on ‘Only Inspiration’ so the East has taken ahold of him). Anyway, the first song ‘Sauna’, “I think I can get by now on my own”, he sings. It's instructive to me, not in the choice of solitude but the belief in one’s own ability and over the course of the album we follow a litany of values and what's of import to him - therein is the lesson or at least a confirmation of my own bias, that this, hopefully not his second last album, marks a moment - I watched a youtube last night, a podcast where the kat speaking spoke about his faith in humanity - I choose us - he said, and after that I watched another one with a dude who said where as the pyramid of capitalism peaks there will be a freeing up of people at the bottom - we will become surplus to requirement but that frees us from the being workers et al. Humans at the bottom will create our own value, we will mean even more to those in our locales; geographical, familial, communal, “we all belong” Afie sings on ‘In Country” and I expect that's what he is doing here, creating, what's the word, the prelude. Anyway that's where my head is inside this album, maybe too big for something being small, but yah - get the vinyl, unplug the phone, have friends over, be in here.