For long-time fans of Against Me!, Transgender Dysphoria Blues (out today) is an album that’s significant before the fact. All questions aside of “keeping this about the music,” it’s the first major release from the band since lead singer Laura Jane Grace (formerly Tom Gabel) first announced, via a May 2012 Rolling Stone interview, that she was transitioning to life as a woman. Under the guise of the band’s new proprietary record label, it also marks a return to a slightly more homespun sound; no more of the major-label sheen that was such a turn-off on their prior two albums. Mostly, though, it’s (arguably) the first time a high-profile musician has addressed transgender issues in such a personal and direct manner, especially within the so-called boy’s club of punk music.
It’s somewhat safe to say that those who identified with Against Me! in the past will continue to do so, assuming they haven’t traded in their anti-establishment values. This is a band that has always operated on the fringe, and in a way, TDB merely takes their body of work to its logical conclusion: by amplifying (and humanizing) some of the most marginalized voices of all.
Clearly, though, it’s a little more personal than that, and one gets the sense that, for Laura, the making of a “coming out album” was an unavoidable aspect of coming to terms with her identity. Previous Against Me! songs — how much more sense does that name make now, by the way? — had hinted at her struggles, but few people made the connection, even after the release of New Wave’s “The Ocean,” which pretty bluntly stated, “If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman/My mother once told me she would have named me Laura.” Her life-long gender dysphoria, she has suggested in past interviews, was compounded by a sort of public figure dysphoria: the nagging and disquieting sense that her audience was connecting to a fraudulent persona, and by extension, to music that lacked authenticity.
Happily, the cognitive dissonance seems absent in this latest effort. In terms of the album’s purely musical merits, it’s doubtful that its punchiest songs will surpass the band’s earlier hits in their iconic status, but if Against Me! sounded out of step for a while, it seems to have found its footing again. Not only is TBD a galvanizing return to a more grassroots sound — polished in a way that only experience can bring — it’s definitely a case of throwing out the bathwater but keeping the baby. All of the familiar earnestness, brash defiance and — some of you might be wondering — instantly identifiable vocals come through in rollicking tracks with characteristically flippant titles like “Osama bin Laden as the Crucified Christ” and “FUCKMYLIFE666.”
Aside from “Two Coffins,” a lovely and morbid tune presumably dedicated to Laura’s four-year-old daughter rivaling only “8 Full Hours of Sleep” in its tenderness, the album could better be described as “Transgender Dysphoria Fuck Shit Up Anthems.”
“No more troubled sleep/There’s a brave new world raging inside of me,” she sings in what’s probably a better summation of TBD’s emotional high note.
The low note? An unflinching acknowledgment of the perils and uncertainty she’ll inevitably face, even with the support of her wife and daughter: “Even if your love was unconditional/It still wouldn’t be enough to save me,” she declares in “Unconditional Love,” as much a song about close relationships as it is about the especially transitory existence of those who trade in their old identities: “Don’t worry young suicides, the vultures will pick your bones dry/Half digested and eternal, somewhere lost in the ephemeral.”
“Black Me Out” is a little less ostensibly about coming out, but it also marks a high point for the album in terms of sound and righteous defiance. Laura has refuted that it’s directed at the major-label bigwigs, but it certainly resonates that way.
Whatever the case, it’s an album that, for all its shortcomings, makes for a convincing catharsis — could it have been any other way? It’s relatable but hardly for the faint of heart — when has Against Me! been anything but? It’s a special circumstance in which the music is the person and the person is the music, and to read it as anything less is missing the point. It’s a matter of, as Laura Jane Grace puts it, “making yourself up as you go along.”
Review by Steph Koyfman. Follow her on Twitter: @stephkoyfman.
