There is a certain trick to being simultaneously angry and melodic.  I’d say that Linkin Park and Rage Against the Machine are good examples of this.  Nine Inch Nails too.  Against Me! pulls off the same trick on the album New Wave.  For a couple of months after I bought this one, I could not stop listening to it.  Every single song on the album stuck in my head.  And the album as a whole worked as, well, a whole album.  I had similar experiences with Green Day’s American Idiot and My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade.  I didn’t want to skip to a certain song.  I didn’t even want to listen to the songs out of order.  I wanted to drop the LP onto my record player, lower the needle and let the thing play the way the band intended it.  New Wave is an album that runs counter to the Ipod ethos.  It demands to be considered as a sum of its pieces.

I understand that New Wave was considered a sell-out by Against Me!’s fans.  I guess that earlier albums were a lot harder and a lot angrier (though the lyrics are still pretty angry here).  Listen to Thrash Unreal, with its harmonizing “ba ba ba” chorus, and tell me it is isn’t the catchiest song ever to include the lyric “your daughter’s gonna grow up to be a junkie.”    Or take White People For Peace – if you want to hear what a sneer sounds like in a song, listen to them indict people who sing “protest songs in response to military aggression.”  But it’s not all just anger here.  On Stop!, they seem to be talking directly to their fans when they sing “Stop, take some time to think, figure out what’s important to you.”  Not a bad message.

Of course, none of this would mean anything to me if the songs weren’t so incredibly listenable.  In my mind, Borne On The FM Waves Of The Heart – a duet with Tegan Quin of Tegan and Sara — should have been a Top 40 hit.  But what do I know.

Alright, enough blather.  If you like your catchy music with a bit of edge, this one is worth checking out.