Blogtown, PDX

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Music Against Me - New Wave

Posted by Ezra Caraeff on Tue, Jul 17 at 12:40 PM

Since I heaped some praise on Justice yesterday, time to share a little love for another of my favorite records of 2007, Against Me’s New Wave.

Major label debuts are a bitch. No matter how hard you try, or how much green the label drops in your name (the more likely scenario), you just can’t win. Against Me knows this, and for the most part, embrace it wholeheartedly with New Wave. It’s a marginally slick major label debut—produced by Butch Vig—that finds the band salting the soil of the punk landscape that nursed them for so long. As far as albums go, it’s a grand fuck-you, totally abrasive, clever, ambitious and most of all, it just feels important. That’s something I haven’t said about a major label punk record in years. Maybe longer.

There are better songs than “Borne On The FM Waves,” and its predictable “met-a-girl-on-tour” template, but I’m a sucker for the vocal interplay between Tom Gabel and Tegan (of and Sarah fame) Quin.

MP3:
Against Me - Borne On The FM Waves

My apologies for the wimpy song selection, because as we all know, falling for the sappy love song on a punk record is totally like listening to LL’s Bigger and Deffer and making a mixtape with “I Need Love,” instead of “The Bristol Hotel” or “I’m Bad.” Lame!

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"We want a band that plays loud and hard every night.
That doesn't care how many people are counted at the door.
That would travel one million miles
and ask for nothing more than a plate of food and a place to rest.
They'd strike chords that cut like a knife.
It would mean so much more than t-shirts or a ticket stub...

...Our arena: just basements and bookstores across an underground America..."

Posted by b | July 17, 2007 1:35 PM

No offense to the merc music editors. You know a lot more about music than I ever will...

Buuuuut--any chance you can move your music stuff outside your general blog feed? I don't like *any* of your music recommendations, and otherwise I like your blog a lot.

Probably no chance in hell, eh? Also, do you have a generic news rss feed? so I can just get all your articles online and be done with killing trees forever?

Posted by indy | July 17, 2007 3:05 PM

Golly, I don't know how I could be offended by that.

I don't think we have an all-News RSS feed, but fear not Indy, the music posts will soon (August?) be moving to a blog of their own. It promises to be a place where my narcissistic rants will go uninterrupted with all those bothersome News posts about sit-lie, bad cops and Scott Moore's bushy beard.

Everyone wins!

Posted by ezra | July 17, 2007 3:29 PM

Indy, as usual I was wrong. Direct RSS feeds are right here!

Posted by ezra (again) | July 17, 2007 3:50 PM

I haven't listened to Against Me!* since their demo (which my friends played over and over for months, and I never liked much -- I liked the songwriting and lyrics, but his voice was so grating). I'm surprised to find that they now sound like Manic Street Preachers. Except with even dumber lyrics. (I like MSP, I should maybe note.)

And I don't think these two voices go well together. Tom Gabel's voice has so much thrust behind it, while Tegan Quin's is kind of small.

Anyway, I don't mean to harsh on it too much. It's a fine song.

*Didn't they used to have an explanation point in their name?!

Posted by rgratzer | July 17, 2007 7:43 PM

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