Against Me! - Transgender Dysphoria Blues (Album Review)
Tuesday, 21 January 2014
Written by Huw Baines
For Laura Jane Grace and Against Me!, ‘Transgender Dysphoria Blues’ is an important record. It’s the first since Grace sat down with Rolling Stone and came out as a transgender woman, and it also follows a period of line-up changes and label upheaval that could have sunk another band.
The album was recorded and re-recorded amid the departures of bassist Andrew Seward and drummer Jay Weinberg, while Grace became a role model to many just as she sought out support herself. The media, newly inquisitive and brazen, also applied their microscope to a band that plenty were all too happy to write off in the wake of ‘White Crosses’ and their departure from the gated community of the majors.
In a recent interview with Spin, Grace said: “The record almost killed the band. 100%.” Coming from the leader of a group that has always inspired heated devotion and plenty of vitriol - whether for label changes or their relationship to punk, that fluid beast - that’s saying something.
The songs here duly have a desperation to them. Lyrically, they are raw and unflinchingly honest; Grace has poured anxiety, anger and everything inbetween into them.
On Drinking With The Jocks, her sights are trained on hypocrisy, in the punk scene and beyond, suicide is a spectre in True Trans Soul Rebel, while Black Me Out, complete with its chorus refrain, “I wanna piss on the walls of your house, I wanna chop those brass rings off your fat fucking fingers”, riffs on the anger of being forced to pretend.
Grace has always been a keen analyst capable of driving at the heart of arguments, be they political or social, with an articulate rage, but here the situations she sketches all carry a personal inflection. It’s often a record about I more than we, and that's one of its greatest strengths. From the opening line of the title track - "Your tells are so obvious, shoulders too broad for a girl" - Grace is disarmingly frank and open.
Her production, too, is a response to ‘White Crosses’ and the label shitstorm that followed it. Not close to being the disaster many painted it as, that record was nevertheless slick and lacking the gut-churning energy of Against Me!’s best work. Here there are jagged edges, a liberal layer of fuzz and a drum sound that at several junctures sounds like a more organic take on Magnetic Fields’ ‘Distortion’ album.
Musically, ‘Transgender Dysphoria Blues’ also addresses the imbalance that existed following the band’s step from anarcho-folk to widescreen alt-rock. It inhabits a hinterland between ‘New Wave’, ‘Searching For A Former Clarity’ and the ragged ‘Reinventing Axl Rose’, with the guitar sound at times a trebly reminder of the opening notes to Pints Of Guinness Make You Strong.
The title track, True Trans Soul Rebel and the Fat Mike-featuring FUCKMYLIFE666 are the kind of deeply melodic fare that Grace has made Against Me!’s defining characteristic in recent years, while Drinking With The Jocks will get under the skin of fans yearning to hear the fury of old. Only the pub rock of Unconditional Love and the plodding, overwrought Osama Bin Laden As The Crucified Christ really fall flat, despite the heart-rending words of the former.
Against Me! have been, and always will be, a band to provoke strong reactions. ‘Transgender Dysphoria Blues’ will be no different, but the very fact that it’s here at all makes it a milestone for Grace and her bandmates. That it’s very good also helps, of course.
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