erica234427 rants...
I bought Sorry For Party Rockin\' and was pretty dissappointed. It wasnt as good as I expected. Oh w ...
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'Writing this record, I spent a lot of time reflecting,' frontman Tom Gabel tells MTV News.By James Montgomery
Against Me!Photo: MTV News
With 2007's New Wave, Against Me! detonated the very notion of what it meant to be a "punk" act. Released on a very major label (Reprise Records) and produced by a very famous name (Butch Vig), the album featured big hooks, even bigger studio sheen and a boy/girl duet thrown in for good measure.
For all the polish, frontman Tom Gabel's snarl remained just as gruff as ever, and the targets AM! set their sights on — the impotence of the music industry, the ineffectiveness of the government, the embarrassment of peace-ified protest songs in an increasingly violent time — very much encompassed the wrongs of "The Man," , circa the last days of the Bush administration. Which is to say that, no matter what AM!'s (many) detractors liked to say about it, Wave was still very much a punk album — and quite the forward-thinking one, at that.
But when it came time to record the follow-up, Gabel didn't find himself looking toward the future once again. Quite the opposite, in fact.
"Writing this record, I spent a lot of time reflecting," he told MTV News. "I spent a lot of time thinking about people I used to know, places I used to hang out, things I used to do — I grew up in the anarcho-punk scene, and I had many experiences in that — so that almost couldn't help but show up on this record."
And the result of all that reflecting is White Crosses (due June 8), an album that matches the bombast of New Wave but, rather than pushing the envelope forward, is resigned to be a rather curdled love letter to Gabel's punk-rock past. Songs like the title track, "I Was a Teenage Anarchist" and "Because of the Shame" detail his time spent kicking around suburban Florida as a knotty crust punk, and none of them are exactly what you'd call "fond remembrances." It's as if, by looking back, Gabel is even more disgusted by the punk scene. And when coupled with the fact that AM! wrap his barbs in a musical mélange of — as he put it — "a little Bowie, T.Rex, Cock Sparrer, some Clash, some Replacements and some Primal Scream," you get the feeling that the sole purpose of Crosses might be to further distance the band from the punx.
But the way Gabel sees it, the album — and, really, Against Me! circa 2010 — is just the product of a very natural evolution; one that comes from playing 200 shows a year, parting ways with your past (last year, the band split with Warren Oakes and replaced him with former Hot Water Music drummer George Rebelo) and being unafraid of moving forward ... even if that means looking backward to get there.
"It forces you to not only re-examine the musical relationship you have with each other, and the way you play with each other, but it forces you to re-examine your friendships," Gabel said. "It's really easy when you tour for so long with the same group of people to fall into roles. You know, like, you're the guy who's always late to bus call, he's the guy who has a really hard time ordering in a restaurant, he's the guy who takes really long showers ... and to have a new person thrown into the mix, it shakes things up, and it gives you a new life. ... I feel like, every year you continue playing as a band, every record that you make, you inevitably — hopefully — become better as musicians, and, really, that's the goal of all of this."
What are you expecting from Against Me!'s new album? Let us know in the comments.
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