Rise Against
Siren Song Of The Counter Culture (Geffen)
by Grady Gadbow
For most people with any brains, it’s hard to find much to celebrate or even be optimistic about when reading the paper or flipping on the tube these days. Sure, there’s war, social repression, and unemployment, but at least we can get those high-capacity banana clips, right? Even that’s cold comfort if you can’t afford that many bullets. One good thing we’ve got going is that political punk rock is getting good again…
The new Rise Against album is a good example. It’s all vigorous up-tempo stuff without a lot of dumb gimmicks or joke songs, just strong chord progressions and climactic choruses and fairly thoughtful lyrics over a hearty, no-frills rhythm section.
This Chicago quartet has been around about five years now and seems to’ve graduated to the big leagues without being replaced by robots.
(www.geffen.com)