Anti-Flag's Plodding Punk Polemic; 'For Blood and Empire' Is Ambitious but Abrasive
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.</br></br>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.</br></br>"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.</br></br>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.</br></br>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.