There was no question Against Me!, the politically-charged punk band out of Florida that is having a remarkably good 2007, would be better Thursday night in its headlining turn at the Grove of Anaheim than it was a little less than two weeks earlier at KROQ’s LA Invasion at Home Depot Center.
Not that this band ever slacks off. The always black-clad quartet played hard that Saturday in the sun – to a few thousand mostly indifferent early birds. It was a testament to the steamroller force of their ingratiating anthems that they seemed to impress a considerable portion of the clueless in that crowd by set’s end.
That’s what happens when you’re having a breakout year on the wings of your best album yet, a sonic, melodic and thematic upgrade aptly titled “New Wave.”
But at the Grove, of course, Against Me! played three times as long and increasingly fiercer to no one but fans, be they fresh converts who can’t get enough of the junkie portrait (and current modern-rock radio fixture) “Thrash Unreal” or loyalists who know every song on the group’s 2002 debut “Reinventing Axl Rose.”
As you might suspect if you’ve heard AM!’s rousing rock, both segments of that audience came to chant and cheer – which they were doing well before the band emerged, bellowing, for instance, at the mere unveiling of the band’s backdrop, a huge enlargement of the new disc’s growling-tiger cover.
If you took a walk from the Grove’s back tier to its front, you’d have noticed each patch of such people growing denser and sweatier – and more elated – until you reached the foremost pit, which became a swaying sea of guys who undoubtedly call each other “bro” locked arm in arm, egging one another on to louder and louder hollering. Kinda like fraternity knuckleheads, kinda like an over-stoked military unit – but much more like the solidarity between band and fans that one could have found at Clash or Pogues or Social Distortion shows years ago.
During “Thrash Unreal,” one of the front pit’s smaller minions managed to scramble onto the stage, where he seized lead singer Tom Gabel’s microphone while he was busy slashing away at his guitar. Rather than being hauled off, the kid instead found himself clenched forehead-to-forehead with Gabel, both booming the last line of the song into the mic. No sooner had the crasher uttered its last syllable than he was charging back into the pit, diving into safe arms.
That’s what I mean by solidarity.
When you get overwhelmed by that kind of reaction – and on the last night of your tour, no less – it’s hard not to raise your game with each passing track. So it was that Against Me! stormed almost relentlessly for more than an hour at the Grove, spotlighting “New Wave” from the very start, employing the chorus question of “Up the Cuts” (“Are you restless like me?”) as an invitation to punk communion.
Smartly strewn across the jam-packed performance were enough older favorites to satisfy the faithful, including “From Her Lips to God’s Ears (The Energizer),” an incisive commentary in which Condoleezza Rice is questioned as a would-be taser target might grill a senator. “After all this death and destruction,” Gabel wonders after crying Condoleezza’s name repeatedly, “do you really think your actions advocate freedom?”
But such “protest songs in response to military aggression,” as Gabel terms them in the new song “White People for Peace,” were only part of the sociopolitical stew here. More often Against Me! follows Gang of Four’s example of keeping a watchful eye on our wild world while placing a greater emphasis on analyzing inner conflict, not outward upheaval. Their songs rarely aim for universal maxims or change-the-world charges. Instead, they take stock before throwing stones (see Gabel’s self-doubt in “Americans Abroad!”) and attempt to stave off insidious apathy. Note how the unsteady sloganeer of “Don’t Lose Touch” resolved his strength in the song that followed, the empowering “Stop!”
All of which would be positively dull were it not for the band’s infectious driving energy and, above all, its intense singing. Gabel again is the standout: Looking like a younger, tougher Ben Folds, he feverishly expels a vocal force that bears striking resemblance at times to the Offspring’s Dexter Holland, albeit with the philosophical disposition of Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin. Guitarist James Bowman and bassist Andrew Seward add to the hearty (if also sometimes samey) whoa-ooh-whoa-ohwail with beaming camaraderie, and when Warren Oakes’ drumming locks in, this bunch can hurtle forward at a breathtaking pace.
But “when” is the operative word. Oakes is skilled, but he’s intermittently tight – he’ll rush into a chorus, stumble out of fills with a splash (not a crash) of a cymbal while applying the brakes, then finish off the same song with sharp triplet fills, thunderous and exact. Punk shouldbe loose to some degree, but Oakes’ slipshod manner can get maddening. I don’t relish pointing it out, but he’s undeniably the weak link in this chain.
Good thing the chain is so resolutely strong right now that his weaknesses can only occasionally be detected.
Contact the writer: 714-796-2248 or bwener@ocregister.com
