AR: White Crosses

Against Me! - White Crosses (2010)

Dove Valley Jon left the new Against Me! album at the house after our recent Austin adventure and requested a review. I didn't question the appearance of this yet-to-be-released album at my house, just uploaded it to my iTunes and tucked the CD in a spare jewel case for the next day's ride to school. Against Me!'s major label debut, New Wave, made quite a splash even outside the band's root punk circles - Spin called it 2007's album of the year - so I was marginally familiar with the band, having picked up that disc as a typical end-of-year-list junkie. The review of that one, as well as the review of their seminal indie label hit, Against Me! is Reinventing Axl Rose, will have to wait for another day. For now, I'll just try to relate the archetypal pop punk experience of rolling down the 202, facing brilliant sunshine and listening to its sister album, the unabashedly, immediate, fist-raising White Crosses.

The album-opening title track encapsulates pretty much everything that's glorious and limited about the album as a whole. "White Crosses" roars in with an utterly unoriginal drumbeat drive, chimes in with a familiar single note rumbling bassline and boasts the most predictable, sunshiney lead guitar melody you've ever heard. The snarl-shouted lyrics sit right in their place, and the chorus kicks in with that appropriate youthful frustration. There's something painfully cliche about the whole bit, yet it's so uncompromisingly earnest that the heart-on-sleeve yearning beats out whatever "PLAYED!" sentiments would escape my lips. It's, in other words, exquisitely professional and powerfully catchy, and despite my best hipster cynical intentions, I can't help but pump my fist along. This is epitomized pop punk in a seemingly pure sense; the album screams on from here (the next track, for Hashem's sake, is "I Was A Teenage Anarchist") in perfect pitch frustration, angst and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered late '70s (or maybe 1994's Dookie?). Okay, that's a cheap joke, and I don't mean to ridicule this AT ALL, because it really does work. But when track two has a chorus that screams "do you remember / when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?." and the next track just flatly emotes "we used to get high together" and backs "Woooooaaaaahhhh-o-o-oh" with "my name tattooed into your skin" over and over, there's something so unfathomably unironic going on that it causes the grand us-with-awareness to get a little uncomfortable. If you need an exhibit 1A, check out "Because of the Shame" at the 2:40 guitar drop-out, drums and tambourine (and are those acoustic boom chords I hear?) section. I defy you to call that original, and yet these guys mean it, mean it so.

Listening to this album evokes the experience of a multifaceted mash-up: there are *tons* of elements of Green Day (check out the flange of "Suffocation" or the faux Brit-punk accent of "Ache With Me"), U2 (the Joshua Tree vibe of "Bamboo Bones," for one), Sex Pistols derivation (the paint-by-numbers "Rapid Decompression"), and a general '80s John Hughes soundtrack appropriateness (wow, "We're Breaking Up"). That's not to say that the songwriting and singing don't place their stamp on all of these tunes, but at least part of the hook relies heavily on poking in and around your cultural mindgeist's subconscious knowledge of pop that has gone before. I hate to review a band by saying "they sound like X mixed with Y," but I hope that's not what I'm doing here - one, I'm acknowledging that they're something more than the mix, and 2, I'd lose my pop music awareness license if I didn't note the completely obvious aped tendencies / influences they sport. (I haven't even mentioned that the endeavor carries a more than a little The Hold Steady baggage, too). Still, if you're keeping score, that's unoriginal sentiments and unoriginal sounds. Crappy review, eh?

No, homes. However they do it, they manage to convince you that this is a tad more than the world's most sincere bar band, and this album that self-consciously breaks no new ground whatsoever deserves multiple spins. For one, it sounds fantastic - Butch Vig (he of Nirvana, Pumpkins, etc. fame) produced it, and part of the reason that everything seems so glaringly in its right place is that it is. For another, it's the ineffable sense that despite the fact that they wear their influences on their sleeves just as plainly as their trite nostalgic teenaged emotions, they unfailingly execute it to the nth degree. I get all the intended chiils, all the tears come to eye on the right planned song gearshifts. What can I say beyond "they pulled it off?"

It also doesn't hurt that there's a genuine leftfield earcatcher on here. "Ache With Me" is effectively a punk-country song, and though there's enough Billie Joe, Mike and Tré to go around, it's still a nice departure from the typical. Again, it's somewhat spot-on sad in a way that makes your cynical side cringe while your believing side nods. But whatever cheese asterisk is required, it's a nice slow stomping tear-jerker.

That pretty much does it - in 36 minutes, Against Me! delivers a uniformly good if somewhat predictable set of songs, all of which will get you humming along even though you realize all the while that you're being had. It's a good if not great album, and while I get the feeling that I'm not exactly the target audience here, the crowd that's looking for some speakers of classic rebellious sentiment to rally behind has a professional set of pulpit speakers behind whom to stand. This one's definitely sticking in the rotation.

Status: Recommended (solid)
Nyet's Fave: "Ache With Me"