Album review: Anti-Flag – The People Or The Gun

You know, it seems like no more than a year ago that Anti-Flag put out their last album – probably because that’s when it actually happened. But here they are again, having changed labels before releasing this year’s summer salvo of protest punk, The People Or The Gun.

If you’re already familiar with Anti-Flag‘s music, The People Or The Gun isn’t going to deliver any unexpected surprises with its basic four-chord sequences, ragged shouty vocals and generous helpings of gang-yelled “whoa-oh” moments. It’s all perfectly competent stuff – none of the old proto-punk sloppiness here – but equally there’s not a single musical idea that you’ll not have heard elsewhere many times over. What saves The People Or The Gun from mediocrity is the sense of energy and conviction that runs right through it; in times when scene leaders like Rancid sound tired and trapped in the amber of nostalgia, it’s almost a relief to know there are still some bands with a bit of fire in their guts.

Anti-Flag‘s main schtuck has always been the asking of awkward questions, and recent events have certainly supplied them plenty of material. To some extent, though, the same circumstances have blunted their effect; it’s hardly revolutionary to be calling out the same quandaries as the major newspapers, and the last twelve months have turned everyone into armchair economists and politicians. Where The People Or The Gun differs from its predecessor, The Bright Lights of America, is in its lack of answers. To be fair, no one seems to have any satisfactory answers to the mess the world is in at the moment, and to expect a punk band to deliver solutions to global crises would be an act of astonishing naivete, but Anti-Flag‘s response is to sideline themselves into dancing on the grave of the past before the hearse arrives.

For example, in “The Economy is Suffering… Let It Die” they sing “when the cities burn down, we’ll all be warm” in the same chorus as rousing repeats of “we’re so fucked”. The latter is inescapable, but the former smacks of the uninformed philosophies of those who think anarchism is best advanced by throwing bricks through the windows of fast-food restaurants. There may be a degree of irony that isn’t coming across successfully here, but praising the potential imminence of societal collapse seems like lazy thinking on Anti-Flag‘s part – after all, if the cities burn down, there’ll be nowhere to put on punk rock shows, for a start – and there’s no back-to-the-land self-sufficient boosterism a la Crass to temper the blow. Sure, we’re all fucked; but if that’s all there is to say, you’re helping about as much as Hudson in Aliens. Likewise, the album’s closer informs us that it’s time to say goodbye to the “Old Guard”, but looking at the headlines the Obama administration is hardly the dawning of a new age. Indeed, as the weeks pass it’s looking more and more like a case of “meet the new boss”.

Political carping aside, The People Or The Gun is a short but solid slab of angry political punk rock, as energetic as it is basic. As I remarked last year when discussing Anti-Flag‘s previous album, “punk” has become a catch-all term for a vast variety of music, a large percentage of which is narcissistic and shallow pop with added guitars and eyeliner; that hasn’t changed, and it’s still good to know that there are bands willing to stand up and address bigger issues than fancying the preppy kid in your class or feeling that your parents don’t respect you. There are more politically incisive bands than Anti-Flag, and there are bands with a broader musical range… but as far as standing up with their hearts on their sleeves is concerned, you can’t fault them one bit.