ANTI-FLAG - The Bright Lights of America

By Josh Mocle - The Kids are So-So - 04/01/2008

Well, it’s another year and another Anti-Flag album. It seems everyone favourite politi-punks have reached their creative peak given the fact that they’ve had some kind of new release on store shelves every year since 2006. This may have something to do with the fact that the political climate in the United States is not improving: George W. Bush is still in office, over 4000 troops have been killed in Iraq and the national debt is now pushing 510 trillion dollars. In other words, for a band like Anti-Flag, who have ostensibly made a career out of pointing out how fucking terrible the American government is, there are plenty of things to write/scream about.

This brings us to their latest release, The Bright Lights of America, released on April 1st on, ahem, RCA Records. I won’t get into how interesting it is that a band who wrote, at various points in their career, songs with titles like “Corporate Rock Still Sucks” releasing their SECOND album with a Sony affiliated, bonafide corporate-rock-creating major label like RCA (for that you’ll have to listen to my podcast or my radio show). Taking all of that baggage (and believe me, there is a lot) out of the equation, how does the record itself stand on its own? The answer is that it pretty much sounds like every other Anti-Flag record created. This band found their musical formula (in this case standard two chord punk rock) very early on and hasn’t really deviated from it since. This makes sense, since front man Justin Sane has stated on multiple occasions that the band considers itself less a punk rock band and more a political organization (coincidently those comments always seemed to come around an election year, but again that isn’t the topic of this piece). By that logic the lack of musical advancement makes a bit of sense and is ultimate forgivable if the topics which they write about reflect the current political climate.

This, I feel, is where the band’s weak point lies. The American political climate hasn’t changed very much in the past three years; therefore, the lyrical content on this record doesn’t really differentiate much from 2006’s For Blood and Empire or last year’s Benefit for Victims of Violent Crime. Which ultimately leads me to ask: did we really need a new Anti-Flag record right now? Haven’t they said all this before? Does a band become redundant when the message begins to repeat like a broken record (ESPECIALLY if the musical structure is identical to past structure)? Sure tracks like the album opener, “Good and Ready,” and the pseudo-anthemic “The Modern Rome Burning” are fun examples of why street punk is still fun, I get the general feeling (with this release more than any other) that the band themselves may feel more important than they actually are (a fact that has become blatantly apparent as the years have gone by). Maybe next time they should actually take some time before releasing a new album, if only to allow a political climate shift to occur thus giving them fresh material to work with.

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