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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: A More Perfect Union

  • Awesong Song Alert! Four Year Strong “Tonight We Feel Alive (On a Saturday)”

    The triumphant (or rather triumphalist) return of the tri-cornered hat may go down as the most dubious – certainly the most strident – fashion (err- political?) trend of 2010. But who knew it would trickle down to the unwashed masses of New England’s indie punk scenes so quickly. Already this year, we’ve seen Titus Andronicus go all Revolutionary (while quoting pre-Presidential Abraham Lincoln) with their video for “A More Perfect Union”. Now, from Worcester, Massachusetts, we have the band Four Year Strong paying earnest tribute to the soldiers of the American Revolution in their video for “Tonight We Feel Alive (On a Saturday)”.

    It’s a near-perfect video for both the song and the band in that the beautifully shot battle scenes match the song’s urgency, while the story highlights and is strengthened by the vocal interplay between the group’s three vocalists. It’s one of those rare feats where the video and the song are each better because of the other. It’s also a nice showcase for the band’s bounty of facial hair (including singer Dan O’Connor’s “expressive eyebrows”).

    You get a sense from the video that the band is pretty politically engaged, but at the same time, it’s pretty impossible to discern where there political sympathies lie; and the truth is the video itself isn’t at all political. It’s just a good, simply told story set to a song that, however confrontational in tempo and delivery, is maddeningly vague. My favorite couplet:

    You asked, What would I stand for?
    The truth is: I STAND FOR THIS!

    I have to say, that hits pretty close to home in a state (Wisconsin) that just un-elected one of the country’s most diligent, principled Senators in favor of a self-funded cypher. Check out the video:

    A couple weeks ago, the band, who outed themselves as unabashed 90s nostalgists with their 2009 covers album Explains It All, posted a new, “pop-up” version of the video. Enjoy:

  • Awesome Song Alert! Titus Andronicus “A More Perfect Union”

    This is a song Glenn Beck stole from Sam Adams. Titus Andronicus is stealing it back. It’s a seven minute indie-rock epic, named for a clause from the Preamble to the Constitution. It opens with an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address. It ends with a quote from prominent 19th Century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Along the way, it (literally) shouts out punk rock transliterations of Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg (a folk singer who, unlike most recently polled Americans, can speak with some authority on what is and what is not socialism), and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, all while sounding like Bright Eyes singer Conor Oberst trying his damnedest to front a volume-uncompromised Thin Lizzy, circa ’76 (Seventeen-76, that is.). I had no idea what I was watching when I, half-sleeping, caught my first glimpse – the last thirty seconds or so – of the video for this song on TV a couple months ago, but it kept me awake that night, the same way watching Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds did.

    “A More Perfect Union” is the lead single from the New Jersey quintet’s sophomore album The Monitor, and it comes on with the sort of triumphal mob rage that Lincoln’s Lyceum Address presciently decried and warned against – the 28-year-old Lincoln believing more than anything that the Union’s demise would come not at the hands of some foreign conqueror (or al-Qaida), but by the pitchforks and nooses of its own rioting hordes (Fox News?) – the same triumphal mob rage that seems to fuel the current Tea Party movement, blindly and nonspecifically angry, fairly puking on its own broad hubris, wrapping itself up in the spirit of the American Revolution, creating itself in the time-and-history-and-politics-distorted image of the Founders. It’s a punk rock opera built out of slogans – “Rally around the flag!” – and proud nationalistic proclamations – “Will I not yell like hell for the glory of the Newark Bears!”. In couplets that Woody Guthrie could sue over, they sing (?) the praises of “brutal Somerville summers” and “cruel New England winters”; of interstate highways, the Garden State Parkway, and the lights over Fenway. You could imagine Sarah Palin as a compulsively literate New Jersey loyalist (I think I just discovered the formula for Sarah Palin anti-matter!); or maybe Springsteen as a fervent, third generation punk rocker on the campaign trail for Van Buren ‘48. Either way, this song is wicked awesome.

    Sadly, the video edits the song down to a more manageable length, but it’s well worth hearing in all its unruly 7 minute glory. Listen here: