Anti-Flag's Plodding Punk Polemic

'For Blood and Empire' Is Ambitious but Abrasive

What is Anti-Flag going to do about the USA? Scold its leaders and criticize its politics in song. (By David Cooper)

After its "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg"/Dead Kennedys glory days, hard-core punk fell into disrepair in the 1990s, flummoxed by the twin specters of Clinton in the White House and Britney Spears atop the pop charts.

But with globalization and the Iraq war proving irresistible targets to everyone from Pink to country singers, American punk appears ready to lace up its Doc Martens and lumber back into the fray. Anti-Flag, one of its best and most visible acts, wasn't in service the first time around, but the band's making up for lost time with its major label debut, "For Blood and Empire," a civics lesson wrapped in a pipe bomb.

"Empire" evokes Rancid fronted by Noam Chomsky, if Chomsky were fond of full-volume lectures on the Downing Street Memo, which he probably is. From its front cover, which depicts the White House lawn festooned with graves, to its sample of Rep. Jim McDermott discussing depleted uranium (was Dido not available?), it's incendiary enough to make "American Idiot" seem like a Republican Party recruitment tool.

To Anti-Flag, the message is the point (after all, how often do you see an album sleeve with footnotes?) and the music is of passing interest. Suffice it to say that like most respectable hard-core outfits, the band has its roots in both British and Northern Cal punk: "Empire" is a patchwork of poppy hard core, less accessible hard core, and the occasional strummed ditty ("1 Trillion Dollar$") about U.S. weapons sales, with just enough kinda-catchy punk ("The Press Corpse") to justify a major label advance.

Cranky and remorseless, as medicinal as it is entertaining, "Empire" wasn't built for subtlety. It's both literate (there are songs about eugenics, and the WTO's farming policies) and ponderous (there are songs about eugenics, and the WTO's farming policies), an exercise in Polemics 101 that at times feels too much like, well, an exercise.

Still, to see a band this good -- during the rare moments it manages to get out of its own way -- given a leash this long can be thrilling. There are moments of great power, like the thunderous opener "I'd Tell You but . . ." sung from the point of view of a dead Iraqi civilian, and "War Sucks, Let's Party!" a septic examination of . . . something.

And some real clunkers: "Emigre" is a clumsy appropriation of the famed "First They Came . . ." poem, with a central couplet ("Next they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out/And then they came for me") that no one on Earth could sing without sounding ridiculous.

Judging from the bagful of historical indignities subbing for an actual theme, Anti-Flag is easily scandalized (did we mention the accompanying fact sheet on eating disorders?) and occasionally hypocritical (any act recording for a multinational conglomerate shouldn't go on too long about the perils of globalization), and the band has crafted an album that's as ambitious and fascinating as it is grim. Even if you're glad they've made it, you may never want to hear it again.