For those who have been living under a rock, Transgender Dysphoria Blues isn’t simply Against Me!’s follow up to their outstanding 2010 effort White Crosses. For lack of a more appropriate phrase, Transgender Dysphoria Blues is the triumphant coming out party for vocalist Laura Jane Grace who announced back in 2012 that she was transgender and would no longer be living as a man. Your Republican grandparents’ worst nightmare, the already abrasive artist formerly known as Tom Gabel would no longer need to hide behind the hypothetical and instead could be as in your face as she wanted, expressing her struggles with gender confusion.
In the works for months, the sixth full length album from Against Me! was produced by Grace. The ten track, 29 minute effort manages to let go of the highly polished sounds Butch Vig masterfully crafted on the band’s last two studio albums to reveal a raw, stripped down, and highly vulnerable collection of songs. While the lyrics of Grace have always left plenty of room for interpretation (and there is no shortage of that on Transgender Dysphoria Blues), the album kicks off with the blunt title track. No matter how you feel about your own gender and sexuality, it’s impossible not to feel the anguish of Grace as she shares her struggle to be noticed as a woman and not an object for hate speech and oppression. It’s a powerful opening to an album that couldn’t be more fitting to the world around us in 2014.
The proverbial tackling of the elephant in the room continues with True Trans Soul Rebel as Grace paints the image of being all dressed up with nowhere to go while questioning, does God bless your transsexual heart? Those feelings continue right into the next song with the powerful Unconditional Love. With Fat Mike of NOFX providing bass on the track, Grace gets extremely personal sharing her feelings that not even God’s unconditional love will save her soul.
For those who worried Against Me! would go soft with the transition from Gabel to Grace, fear not as Transgender Dysphoria Blues shows that Grace is as angry as ever. Drinking With The Jocks is an unapologetic anthem documenting the struggles of trying to fit in with the boys while feeling a massive disconnect, before ultimately accepting it’s never going to happen.
One of the most exciting track on the album is Osama Bin Laden As The Crucified Christ. While many of the lyrics are not clearly understood without a proper lyrics sheet (damn you NPR stream), Against Me! makes a massive leap in sound on the politically charged track. With a thundering bass line and swirling guitars, Against Me! sounds more like Jane’s Addiction than the Florida-based punks we have grown to love over the past 15 years. It’s an exciting breath of fresh air as Grace proves she still has a deep passion for political upheaval while redefining what Against Me! can be on a sonic level.
Taking the classic sounds from fellow Florida rockers Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and speeding it up, FUCKMYLIFE666 once again goes right into the nucleus of the struggle with being born a man yet identifying as a woman. While I will never truly be able to relate to what Grace has experienced, hearing her sing: Chipped nail polish and a barbed wire dress, is your mother proud of your eyelashes, silicone chest and collagen lips, how would you even recognize me? …manages to feel both liberating and painful.
While Against Me! has managed to float up to the mainstream with their last two albums, the band is not exactly a household name. With a smart marketing plan and a little bit of luck, that could very easily change with the acoustic ballad Two Coffins. Strikingly simple and universally relatable, Two Coffins is a beautiful look at sharing your eternal sleep with the one you love.
Transgender Dysphoria Blues ends on a high, yet peculiar note with Black Me Out. I won’t pretend to understand what Grace is tackling with the lyrics on this one, but who doesn’t love hearing all about pissing on walls and wishes of mutilation upon fat fingers while blacked out drunk? That’s the thing about Transgender Dysphoria Blues, where many will get it, very few will understand it. We won’t know what it is like to be born as one sex and identify as another. We won’t know the struggle of not fitting in with other members of your gender no matter how hard you try. Yet thanks to most of the songs on this album, we can have a better understanding of something that is still extremely taboo in the early years of the 21st century. If that’s not true punk rock aesthetic, then I don’t know what the fuck is.
Reviews published prior to February 23, 2015 used a 1-5 star rating system.
