Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

RESIST. REVOLT. RECLAIM choke slams the listener into a puddle of mucky dissonance over the current, American political regime.  This ain’t nearly as pretentious as one would imagine.  It’s not nearly as dumbed down as one would think it either.  Sadaharu, if I may quote the “stranger” from The Big Lebowski, is a band that “fits right in there”.  Sadaharu is pure punk rebellion, drawing similarities between Fugazi and The Refused stylistically.  The witty lyrics, themselves however, are much more akin to Rage Against the Machine’s gasoline soaked spitfire.

Sadaharu is metal.  Sadaharu is straight-line punk.  Sadaharu is jazz.  The band is basically a fusion of a lot of sounds that complement vertically, as opposed to horizontal dabbles into the lesser musical augmentations.  What I mean is that these guys take these sounds and barrel ahead with them rather than slow down and loiter amid them for a hot second and move onward up the power chord highway to inevitably halt for another wayside peculiarity.  It’s the “hippie migration effect”: if you’re meeting us in San Francisco, then goddammit, you’re gonna journey the whole way with us to San Francisco; albeit all the hallucinogens and free love that make a sweaty trip to San Fran in a beat up Vanogen palatable.  Sadaharu does that.  These Lancaster boys take some good things that aren’t necessarily their core sound and weave them in there tighter than an Aruban hairdresser and use it to propel every song from start to finish. 

Yes, it’s cool when bands like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy devolve into little flashes of cabaret or hip-hop, but that just ain’t that forceful.  And that’s what RESIST. REVOLT. RECLAIM is: forceful.  Here there are high society quandries that are delivered in timeless punk fashion… by ramming that shit straight down our throats.

Needless to say, these boys don’t like George Walker Bush’s America.  I’d generally be inclined to turn this war profiteering shit-sound off when it first hits my ears (i.e. Linkin Park’s “Hands Held High”, The All Boy-Band Tribute to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On”, and Spice Girls’ “2 Become 1”), but these guys actually are sincere.  Or at least they do a damn good job making it seem that way.  RESIST. REVOLT. RECLAIM is not diluted, it does not flow symmetrically, and it sure as hell doesn’t sound like it was OK’ed by a bunch of marketing suits.  I guess it’s still war-profiteering to a certain extent, but at least it comes off more intelligently and with a little more uncertainty.  That’s honesty.  If I don’t expect, in this day and age, for my elected officials to be qualified enough to give me certainties about complex social phenomenon then how the hell am I going to swallow the solutions constructed by N’SYNC?

Grab a Heineken mini-keg and stage the revolution properly.  While you’re at it, pop RESIST. REVOLT. RECLAIM in the shuffle and feel less guilty you just blew dad’s money on faux coolness.