AGAINST ME!
New Wave
(Sire)
When Gainesville polit-punks Against Me! hit the scene with their
debut seven-inch, Crime as Forgiven by Against Me!, and their
riotous and upbeat full-length Reinventing Axl Rose in 2002,
hordes of anarchists, gutter punks, and DIY basement bros across the
nation clambered aboard their train.
The band was more than just a punk outfit—they were a movement, and
they shared their ideas and opinions with a sense of humor. They lit an
activist spark with their blistering anthems and they fostered a sense
of community through music. They played shows in small, crammed spaces,
with the audience becoming participants in the performance—it was
direct action, participatory democracy, and anarchist revolution as a
punk show.
The admiration they received was so strong that fans have held them
up to the standards set by Axl Rose and its era ever
since.
Not counting their acoustic EP and live record, two full-lengths
have come and gone since the days of Axl Rose (2003’s As
the Eternal Cowboy and 2005’s Searching for a Former
Clarity), and with each album the band have evolved both musically
and ideologically.
Their songs are no longer as rough, their steadfast
antiwar/anticonsumerism ideas are no longer the backbone of every
track. And with their new album, New Wave, the band has made
the bound-to-be-criticized move to a major label. They don’t have the
same youthful, idealistic passion—but they’re still passionate. They’re
just on a different ride, a new wave if you will. From the anthemic
title track to the ridiculously catchy “Thrash Unreal,” Against Me! are
exploring music with a lighter heart. But they’re still willing to
emotionally bleed for the fans they’ve connected with (“The Ocean”),
and they still make observations about our current political chaos
(“Americans Abroad” and the slightly tongue-in-cheek “White People for
Peace”), even if those observations are less pointed than their
previous manifestos.
The Against Me! of New Wave aren’t striving to be a
movement, they’re happy just being a band. And that’s okay. Because
they’re a damn good one. MEGAN SELING
Against Me! play the Capitol Hill Block Party on Sat July
28.
NICOLE WILLIS AND THE SOUL INVESTIGATORS
Keep Reachin’ Up
(Light in the Attic)
I’m rarely impressed by tarted up “retro” groups. They’re usually
kids trying too hard or hopefuls who get overhyped as sounding
“exactly” like some specific period. Even if they get a passable look
going while aiming for that period’s sound, if the crap songwriting
doesn’t kill it, the big, bright contemporary production does. So,
normally, I couldn’t care less. Then I heard Ms. Nicole Willis, singing
with the Soul Investigators, just nailing the hell outta early ’70s
modern SOUL!
Their collaboration, Keep Reachin’ Up, first issued last
year in Europe, is packed with midtempo modern soul and crossover
groovers—all “A” sides—with only a few not-too-distracting funk
flourishes. The songs are thoughtfully arranged, with occasional
strings, and Willis’s voice bounces around gracefully with no flashy
dynamics or gangly vibrato. And Keep Reachin’ Up maintains its
brilliant soulful simmer when held against soul produced circa
1969–1971. The pesky production is just about right, like the Daptones’
take on King label funk: The edges have a bit of tooth and it’s just a
tad overdriven for proper (period) punch. But it perfectly suits their
songs’ late ’60s/early-’70s informed-American-soul coolness.
That this group makes nearly perfect contemporary modern
soul/crossover is remarkable. In fact, it’s a nice jump for Willis, as
she was previously producing contemporary R&B/club action. As for
the Investigators, they’ve been playing for 10 years or so, with a
couple solid funk LPs and a handful of 45s, but Keep Reachin’
Up is a welcome step forward. MIKE NIPPER
BIG A LITTLE A
GAame
(Gigantic Music)
1/2
Aa (BIG A little a) are best experienced live. Their percussive
tangents and trippy noise manipulations aren’t really the building
blocks of catchy pop songs, even if they make for sweaty, transcendent
live sets. Their debut, a white-vinyl, one-sided 12-inch had nothing on
the kinetic excitement of the basement show where I bought it. Their
latest release, GAame, comes closer to capturing that
energy—if only because it comes with a DVD of music videos and live
footage.
The music itself is Aa’s best recorded work yet. The percussion is
resonant and clear, the digitally striated samples and synths are
alternately feral and chemical, and childlike chants and primal screams
are well mixed throughout. It’s still not as moving as Aa are in
concert, although tracks like “Good Ship,” “Manshake,” and “Thirteen”
come close.
As for the videos: “Thirteen” mixes live footage of the band
performing at one of Todd P’s warehouse shows (look for the author in
the front row around the 1:45 mark) with digitally saturated, backward
running shots of pink feathers floating and drums rolling around a
sun-soaked Brooklyn. “Time In” finds the band’s titular letters
battling some violent Xs in a kind of warped Sesame Street interlude. “Fingers to Fist” depicts a bizarre scene of wilderness
survival. “Uracle” hallucinates on the geometry of the Pentagon and the
colonialist implications of Alex P. Keaton. Live recordings from a
handful of shows best testify to the spirit of their performances.
If GAame isn’t a wholly successful translation of the
experience, it’s still an artful document of the band’s sounds,
visions, and feats. ERIC GRANDY
BIG A little a play the Comet on Sat July 28.
T.I.
T.I. vs. T.I.P.
(Grand Hustle)
After last year’s mammothly successful and beloved King,
T.I. now finds himself in the classic precarious position of producing
his post-world-beating record. Like many great and/or popular artists
before him, T.I. deals with this situation by hanging a conceptual skin
over his new album, an approach which, for other artists, has yielded
such intense vortexes of creative madness as Around the World in a
Day and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. For his
new album, T.I. vs. T.I.P., the man born Clifford Harris has
chosen to further explore the somewhat ill-defined internal dichotomy
between his thug and celebrity selves debuted on the song “T.I. vs.
T.I.P.” from 2003’s Trap Muzik.
Things begin stirringly, as the first of three narrative-driving
“Act” introductions sets a tone as indulgently ridiculous as Pink
Floyd’s The Wall, with a similar combined sense of crushing
stardom and scarring personal trauma. Unfortunately, the rest of the
album does little to flesh out the record’s roughly sketched conflict,
with the majority of the songs sounding like the songs on any other
T.I. record. Fulfillment of dubious grand artistic designs aside,
T.I. vs. T.I.P.‘s tracks range from truly great (“Help Is
Coming”) to unintentional parody (“Da Dopeman”) to just adequately
bounce-laden (lead single “Big Things Poppin'”).
When the album’s purported core themes are put front and center,
things get truly strange and interesting. “Act III” finds the twin
protagonists embroiled in a heated and ridiculous meeting at a mirror
(which ends with the sound of glass breaking), and the next song, “Tell
‘Em I Said That,” finds them united in a discourse on the culturally
damaging effects of faux-criminal rappers. The record’s suddenly
emotional finale, “My Type,” is more like the epic self-mythologizing
of T.I.’s oft-referenced peer Jay-Z than any of his own past work. It’s
an assured ending, full of self-satisfied gravitas, to a conceptually
jagged album. SAM MICKENS
scabies
eczema
psoriasis
shingles
