There’s this great line running through This Monologue Conversation. For all its anxiety about conformity, fear and human contradiction, the record itself only exists because three friends refused to let it disappear.
It’s an angle that gives I Plead Irony’s third album a satisfying sense of stubbornness. Rauf Jordan, Paul McDonald and Lawrence Arnold began making music together more than two decades ago, and that shared history comes through in the way these songs move. Ideas sound tested in the room, pushed until they catch fire, then left alone before the life gets polished out of them.
The result is an alt-rock record with real bite. Punk urgency and bluesier edges roughen the corners, while the band’s instinctive interplay keeps even the darker material animated. Across eleven tracks, they take on self-imposed limitations, identity, conformity, fear and the uncomfortable possibility that progress is far less permanent than we like to imagine.
But what keeps This Monologue Conversation from becoming relentlessly grim is the personality behind it. I Plead Irony are clearly fascinated by contradictions, but they are also capable of laughing at them. Even the album title continues a running joke that began with This Statement Is False and The Solution Is The Problem, turning philosophical paradox into part of the band’s DNA.
Its long gestation only adds another contradiction. Much of the record was already in place before distance, work and the pandemic scattered the momentum. Years later, the trio returned because the material still mattered enough to finish. Guillaume Doussaud’s mix and master then pull recordings made across different periods into one coherent whole.
This Monologue Conversation feels like a record dragged back from the brink by friendship, good songs and sheer bloody-mindedness. Ten years on, I Plead Irony don’t sound late to their own party. They sound delighted they never cancelled it.