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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Against Me!’s “Shape Shift With Me”

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Shape Shift With Me is an angry breakup record, full of fuck-yous to exes. It’s a roaring punk-rock record. It’s a complicated and personal record that makes you want to sing along to its accusatory anthems. Since its inception in 1997, Against Me! has been an overtly socio-political band, and Shape Shift With Me’s opener, “ProVision L-3,” continues in that spirit. It’s an aggressive, shouting rant about security screening and a “culture of suspicion.” But that song is a false lead: The rest of the album addresses personal relationships, mostly with bitterness: “You walk me like a dog and I’m sick of rolling over” (“12:03”); “The easiest way to untangle a knot, just forget I was here, cut me out of your heart” (“Norse Truth”); “Want you to hit me like a bus, and then I’ll get the fuck right up” (“Rebecca”).

There are glimmers of hope—“I want to be as close as I can get to you” (“333”); “I want to say the words to someone like I used to say the words to you” (“Crash”)—but they’re few and far between the recriminations.

Of course, the personal is also political, and Laura Jane Grace knows that being a transgender (and previously married) woman whose voice still presents as male adds another layer of meaning to these relationship songs. When she sings, “Treat me like a boyfriend, like some dumb fucking boyfriend” (on “Boyfriend,” one of two songs written with the Blood Brothers’ Cody Votolato), the gender reference is complex. Fewer songs, however, are as gendered as those on 2014’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues, but that album used a persona to tell a story. This one is overtly first person (and is a prelude to Grace’s memoir coming this fall).

Shape Shift With Me has catchy anthems, heavy rock songs and speedy rants; it’s yet another excellent, and complicated, Against Me! album.

—Steve Klinge