Ben Strange ’13 on one album’s battle cry for emotional honesty and drunken catharsis
Ben Strange
Staff Writer
Though loud and clumsy, at least the guitars are usually in tune. The rhythm section, led by the compulsively out-of-time snare drum, lends itself better to words like “urgent” and “shattered” than “musically able.” The album has perhaps two notable bass lines.
Take that, add in Tom Gabel’s abrasive scream and a collection of probably drunken, certainly tone-deaf shouted choruses, and Against Me!’s full-length debut makes an odd favorite for the musically refined ear. Maybe I just don’t have one.
Gabel’s often-rambling ruminations question what’s comfortable, or what’s rational. They embrace what’s felt, as the conflict between those forces persists in all aspects of Gabel’s life, from love to politics and friendship. Maybe he doesn’t question rationality so much as break it before your eyes with a tremble, singing, “I know, I’m a little shook up about it, too.”
Nowhere is the positive side of that message clearer than in the album’s title track, where Gabel asks for a scene “where honesty and emotion are not looked down upon,” and where “we do it all because we have to, not because we know why.” Similarly, in “I Still Love You Julie” Gabel reveres a night of drunken singing with friends, when no one thinks about tomorrow’s return to another mundane day.
The album carries political themes, too. “Baby I’m an Anarchist” should perhaps be recognized as the album’s standout track for its biting criticism of liberalism and government. But Gabel hints elsewhere that this anthem is as much a comfortable and easy stance as ones held by the weak-minded liberals he detests.
In fact, “I’m a Molotov cocktail, you’re Dom Pérignon,” in “Baby” matches too well with Gabel’s sardonic critique of drawing the world into the neat little factions of “consumers” and “revolutionaries” in “Those Anarcho-Punks Are Mysterious” to be an accident.
Is all of this attitude just blind escapism? I think not. Gabel’s rejection of rationality, and of all those comfortable lies we tell ourselves, is a little too reflective and self-aware for that. In “We Laugh At Danger,” Gabel speaks of holding on to those few precious moments when what was spoken was all that mattered, so why is the night described on the trace “I Still” so “sadly beautiful?”
Because we all know how comfortable the lie is. Rationalization keeps many emotions in check that we’d rather pretend didn’t exist. Usually, it accomplishes this quite well.
Gabel knows it, too. The album concludes with his inability to throw off what should be that thin veil. In “Walking is Still Honest,” Gabel tells of a mother who lies to her child “so she’ll sleep at night.” But as the child grows she questions why the lie doesn’t reflect reality, the loss of dreams and the failure to seek truth.
Gabel also gives the answer in this chorus: The child resolves to not give up, not while walking is still honest. The final song of the album, “8 Full Hours of Sleep,” however, reflects sadly upon why the lie and the sleep is so much easier because “when you sleep, no one is lonely in a dream … she’s standing there with open arms … and if you asked her, she never let go.”
The album finishes with a declaration — “and if young hearts should explode from all the lies they’ve been told: to live through one night like this, I would trade it for the silence.”