(((shadowplay)))

What are we going to do now?

Here's the thing. I love Against Me! I freely acknowledge that the wondrous noise of Reinventing Axl Rose will forever kick the crap out of Searching for a Former Clarity. I don't think necessarily that their best album (so far) is the one that came out on the smallest label (No Idea), that they had a pretty good album followed by a mediocre one on a larger label (Fat Wreck Chords). I'm doing my best not to fear the next album, coming out on an even larger label (Sire). But I think that Against Me! is going to manage to do what many other bands before them have done.

They're probably going to continue going downhill.

It happens all the time -- the Get Up Kids, the Promise Ring, (arguably) REM (although I'm on the fence on that one), (arguably) Fugazi, etc., etc. For every band like Radiohead, that grows (in their case, from an angsty preteen into a schizophrenic twenty-something) from album to album, there are plenty of bands that just keep getting worse.

Against Me! had a clear, unwavering politicism on their earlier songs that I still find amazing. That's what has gone missing over time. I don't care about slick, I don't care about label, I don't care about any of that junk. The fact is that the closest thing they have to a really political song on the newest album seems to be "From Her Lips to God's Ears (The Energizer)", and on that song they replace the "fuck this world, we're all in this together" message with a knee-jerk reaction to Condoleeza Rice. I still like the song, but it still hasn't managed to weasel its way into my mind the way that "Those Anarcho Punks are Mysterious..." or "We Did it All for Don" have. Heck, I like "Don't Lose Touch", even with its quasi-Creedence guitar work. I just think that "Don't Lose Touch" should be a message from us to the band, not the other way around.

This all came from watching the video for "Energizer" a few minutes ago. I thought that the video for "Don't Lose Touch" was a pretty good one, especially to introduce the world to the band. It's simple, not much of anything to it, but it's okay. "Energizer"'s video doesn't even really correspond with the song, except the visual (this time) knee-jerk Rice reaction. They blew a chance at what could have turned out fairly powerful, all because some animator friend of theirs watched the "Float On" video a couple of times and had some animal masks lying around.

All that said, I still may drive to Cleveland on Friday to see Against Me! play.

posted by Bill @ 10:54 PM