The Geraniums’ music is a peculiar pairing. The music on this album, recorded between 2011 and 2016, is a great take on rock ‘n’ roll with crisp guitars, solid bass, melodic violin, and rhythms that both rocks and rolls. But it is the late Brendan Gallagher’s vocals and lyrics that make this band unique. Gallagher half sings, half speaks his lyrics, which split between being oblique and obvious, sarcastic and heartfelt. They take leaps and turns that continue to surprise and pull the listener in. The music is varied and well-written, and the songs are all different but also fit together as part of the whole. The music is propulsive in its own way, and it moves in directions that make sense to the listener. Whatever Gallagher is singing and however he is singing it, or whatever the band is playing and how they are playing it, they do it with conviction and almost a sense of desperation. Many of the subjects in the songs seem to be in situations that they are trying to get out of, or they have just escaped those situations. The music and lyrics reflect this whether it’s the menacing chords or the subject’s proclamation that “There’s nothing for us here / except the endless night” in “Quadrant #9” or the crows who are never coming back “from their sojourns to the violet forever” in the song “The Violet Forever.” Such profundity does not take away from the subtle humor of statements like “Could Jesus give salvation to a loser like me?” in “Red Cadillac” and the lament heard in “Connie” who “runs up a mighty tab for you at the Circle Bar.” Hope Is Not for the Weak continues to draw the listener in for all these reasons, and it acts as a great tribute to both Gallagher, who passed away in 2021, and drummer Daemon Shea, who died at the beginning of 2020.