If I Should Fall from Grace with God

If I Should Fall from Grace with God detonates in under two seconds — a furious accordion-and-banjo gallop that fuses Irish traditional reels with the snarl of punk. The Pogues play at a reckless tempo, instruments tumbling over each other with a looseness that feels perpetually on the edge of collapse, which is precisely the thrill. Shane MacGowan's voice, slurred and gap-toothed and utterly human, careens through the verses like a man singing his own wake. The lyric is gallows defiance dressed as a drinking song: a request to be buried not in consecrated ground but somewhere the wind can take him, faith and damnation treated with the same boozy shrug. Beneath the swagger runs the Irish diaspora's perennial ache — exile, displacement, the dead left behind — surfacing pointedly in the verse about children gunned down in a foreign war. Produced by Steve Lillywhite in 1988, the title track of the band's most acclaimed album captures Celtic punk at full flight, neither museum-piece folk nor sneering rock but a third thing, vital and raucous. It's a song for the pub at closing time, for arms thrown around shoulders, for laughing in the face of mortality. The joy and the grief are the same gesture, sung at a sprint.