Dropkick Murphys - Okemah Rising (LP)

Dropkick Murphys didn’t just revisit Woody Guthrie’s notebooks for Okemah Rising, they built a second home there. Coming hot on the heels of 2022’s This Machine Still Kills Fascists, this companion album again stitches unpublished Guthrie lyrics to the band’s brawny Celtic folk engine. The title nods to Guthrie’s birthplace in Okemah, Oklahoma, and the choice isn’t cosmetic. These songs were cut at The Church Studio in Tulsa, Leon Russell’s old haunt, with longtime producer Ted Hutt guiding the sessions. You can feel that sense of place in the wood and wire of the arrangements, which lean mostly acoustic but never polite. Fiddle, banjo, accordion, and bodhrán do the heavy lifting where overdriven guitars once would, yet the stomp is unmistakably Murphys.

If you caught the first record, you’ll know the premise works because the fit is so natural. Guthrie’s words buzz with labor fire, gallows humor, and a plainspoken bite that Ken Casey eats up on the mic. With co‑frontman Al Barr still on hiatus during this period, Casey carries the lead vocals, and his grainy bark feels built for these street‑corner sermons. The band has history with Guthrie, of course, having turned “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” into a sports‑arena staple years ago, but Okemah Rising digs deeper into stories that feel closer to the bones of folk tradition.

“Gotta Get to Peekskill” is the immediate standout, a nervy sprint featuring Violent Femmes that tips straight into American history. The lyric points to the 1949 Peekskill riots surrounding a Paul Robeson concert, when anti‑communist mobs tried to shut down the performance and unions formed human chains to get fans out safely. The Murphys and the Femmes drive it like a news ticker on fire, bass thumping, snare rattling, voices stacked and urgent. It’s one of those pairings that looks odd on paper, then lands perfectly in your ears.

Elsewhere the band moves from grit to uplift with easy stride. “My Eyes Are Gonna Shine” opens like a front‑porch prayer and swells into a gang‑vocal roar, the kind of chorus you’ll hear in union halls and hockey arenas alike. “I Know How It Feels” rides a steady shuffle and accordion lilt while Casey leans into Guthrie’s empathy for the down‑and‑out. “Rippin Up the Boundary Line,” with Jesse Ahern in the mix, takes a broadside to borders and small‑mindedness, a theme Guthrie returned to often. And sprinkled throughout are those little Guthrie turns of phrase that still cut: simple words, sharp edges, no wasted breath.

What keeps Okemah Rising from feeling like an academic exercise is the way the band plays to its strengths without sanding off the splinters. Tim Brennan switches between mandolin, bouzouki, and banjo like a shortstop turning double plays. Matt Kelly’s drumming is all muscle and pocket, even when the kit sounds stripped down. The pipes and whistles aren’t window dressing, they’re hooks. Hutt captures it with a live‑in‑the‑room crackle, so you get the sway of bodies, the scrape of pick on string, the clatter that comes with friends shouting on the same side of a cause.

There’s also a sense of continuity with their last run of tours, where the band championed these Guthrie projects with stripped setups and long stories between songs. Nora Guthrie’s stewardship of her father’s archives has been central to this whole endeavor, and you can hear the trust. These aren’t museum pieces. They’re work songs and fight songs, dusted off and handed to a band that understands the job.

If you’re crate‑digging for Dropkick Murphys vinyl, this is a sweet curveball for the shelf, and Okemah Rising vinyl sits nicely next to Signed and Sealed in Blood or The Warrior’s Code when you’re flipping sides on a rainy night. Folks who buy Dropkick Murphys records online will find plenty of retailers stocking it, and any Melbourne record store with a good punk and folk section should have a copy in the bins. Same goes for shops dealing in vinyl records Australia wide. There’s a surge in demand for Dropkick Murphys albums on vinyl right now, and this one earns the spin through sheer heart.

Okemah Rising doesn’t try to reinvent the band. It reminds you why they’re still vital. In Guthrie they found a lyricist who knew how to swing a hammer with words. In Dropkick Murphys those words found a crew that could raise the frame in a day and invite the neighborhood over to sing along.