It’s been easy to disagree about the fluid and often conflicting ideology of Against Me! over the years. They were born to the Gainesville, Fla., scene as anarcho-punks, wearing black and fully DIY; NOFX's Fat Mike offered the band some money and off they went to his Fat Wreck label, a farm league for the majors where bands could slug Bro Hymns to the kids at Warped Tour. Then Sire offered them even more money so they went up to a major, effectively jettisoning any remaining Reinventing Axl Rose ideologues. And finally in 2010, lead singer Laura Jane Grace (who was then known as Tom Gabel) sang her mea culpa/kiss-off to all those who cried “sell outs,” to those who would go to Against Me! shows and stand there with a middle finger in the air in silent protest wearing studded vests and liberty spikes. She sang on “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” with her own middle finger to the crowd: “You want me to surrender my identity/ I was a teenage anarchist/ The revolution was a lie.”
But identity is a different thing entirely—it's what houses ideology, where ideology goes to gather agency and dig roots. In a rare act, Laura Jane Grace and Against Me! draw a hard line between these concepts with their sixth studio album Transgender Dysphoria Blues. It’s almost kismet for a band who’s been lambasted for not committing to their ideologies to make an album about a real identity crisis. Grace came out as transgender in 2012, and started writing these songs around that period. They were built out from raw acoustic folk punk into 10 songs of slapdash glam punk that carry great urgency, even those songs that don’t directly concern Grace’s journey. She makes all that cis punk sound limp in comparison.
Good news for early adopters of the band: all that Butch Vig lacquer from their last two albums has mostly been scraped off. The record even opens with a little cowpunk shuffle on the title track to firmly mark a departure from the arena stylings of New Wave and White Crosses. Produced by Grace and put out on her own label Total Treble, the band splits the difference between old and new into a compact sound that skews more Sex Pistols than Foo Fighters. It’s comparatively gaunt for Against Me! as of late, but it yields the stage to Grace’s voice, which has never sounded better.
The aggression peaks right at the top, when years of suppression meet the rage in her voice with lines like, “You’ve got no cunt in your strut/ You’ve got no hips to shake” and “They just see a faggot.” It escalates soon after on “Drinking With the Jocks”, where Grace dissembles with and dismantles misogynistic bro culture in about two minutes flat. She sings, “There will always be a difference between me and you” with a little diva flip, the perfect inflection for the album’s key pull-quote.
For every “fuck you” there is an equal and opposite “fuck me,” where all the anger that’s on the surface of the album starts to crack and reveal deap-seated anxiety flowing underneath. Consider that Grace may, as she's discussed, undergo plastic surgery to be who she wants to be, in addition to taking treatments of estrogen, progesterone, and Spironolactone all while confronting stigmas and thwarting skeptics along the way. While never too overtly stated, displacement and shame color Grace’s growl, especially on the MySpace username as song title “FuckMyLife666”, which incidentally reconnects the band with Fat Mike, who plays bass on the track. It really cuts to hear Grace sing from the judgmental third person: “Chipped nail polish and a barbed wire dress/ Is your mother proud of your eyelashes?” Later in the song, she submits another competitor for Tagline of the Album: “There's a brave new world that's raging inside of me.”
If only Grace could rest her big black margiela boots on these singular moments, these battle cries for trans culture. The songs themselves are never as daring as Grace herself throughout Transgender Dysphoria Blues. You can feel her breath on your face, taking on the jocks, death (on the acoustic “Two Coffins”), major label execs (“Black Me Out”), and even Osama Bin Laden. She sometimes spirals into the verbose and clunky lyricism that has followed her around her entire career, as on “Dead Friend”, whose words seem untimely ripped from someone still in the gangly throes of grief.
In detours from the title topic, Grace’s anger is scrawled too hard and too sloppy on the page—see “Osama Bin Laden as the Crucified Christ”. Any of the song’s grander metaphors are lost behind the jingoistic chorus, “You’re gonna hang like Benito from the Esso rafters/ Hang like Clara with her skull caved in.” The eye-for-an-eye, boot-in-yer-ass simile is some distance from throwing shade at Robert McNamera on White Crosses. It’s easy to look past occasionally ineffectual production, staid song arrangements, and static guitar riffs when Grace—as she discovers herself on the album—is anything but ineffectual, staid, or static. But when she addresses politics or mortality, the record falls flat and lapses into gawky extremes.
If Transgender Dysphoria Blues was wholly focused on transgender dysphoria blues, it would push aside so much of what Against Me! has built through the years; even in their shortcomings, they remain who they are. But it's fitting that there are facets of the album that refuse to cohere, that don't quite fit right, that flail about in its too-eager execution. These welts are ultimately part of Grace's journey to the depths of self-discovery, and the journey to Against Me!'s true sound, all while playing to the theme of transformation. Punk has always been about disruption of order, and this new revolution that Laura Jane Grace leads doesn't surrender her identity, it reclaims it. This revolution is no lie at all.
