The last line of  “Bamboo Bomes”, a single off of Against Me!’s 2010 album “White Crosses” is shouted out defiantly by singer and guitarist Laura Jane Grace: “What God doesn’t give to you, you’ve got to go out and get for yourself.”

And that’s what she did. The artist, born Thomas James Gabel, came out as transgender in 2012 and is currently transitioning. “Transgender Dysphoria Blues,” Against Me!’s sixth studio album, serves as a megaphone for everything the artist has bitten her tongue about for her entire life.

The sometimes graphic lyrics are strikingly honest and offer a window into Grace’s soul that has been bolted shut for the first decade and a half of the band’s existence. The album starts off with single “Transgender Dysphoria Blues,” a catchy pop-punk song about the daily internal struggles of a transgender woman: “You want them to notice, the ragged ends of your summer dress, you want them to see you, like they see every other girl,” Grace sings.

One pleasant surprise on the record is Grace’s newfound attention to melody. Against Me! has been characteristically unmelodic up to this point. It’s been a punk band that is more concerned with spitting out lyrics that challenge authority than crafting catchy tunes.

Here, Grace has found a way to do both. She is still a defiant anarchist but she allows herself to be at least a little more vulnerable by singing more than screaming. This has been an ongoing development since the band’s 2007 major label debut, “New Wave,” but Grace has finally made it work by matching lyrical content to her vocal delivery.

While the band’s melodic development is welcome and applauded, the music is still nothing spectacular.

Pop punk bands are notorious for being stuck somewhere outside the great, raw energy field of true punk music, leaving the listener nothing but fast power chords and mediocre vocals. A band like Against Me! has to have some pretty important stuff to say to make listening worthwhile. This time, Against Me! does.

“Transgender Dysphoria Blues” is followed by “True Trans Soul Rebel,” which features another infectious melody. The music is actually upbeat, but the lyrics again illustrate the thoughts and feelings of a woman fighting to be outwardly who she is inwardly. With lines like, “You should’ve been a mother, you should’ve been a wife, you should’ve been gone from here years ago, you should be living a different life,” Grace candidly discusses what she’s been struggling with secretly all this time.

Another standout track is “Drinking with the Jocks,” which exhibits the band’s classic fast, raw and pissed off sound. The song is about Grace wanting to fit in with jocks, despite hating them. Almost anyone could relate to this. It’s a timeless tale of wanting the cool kids to like you even when you don’t really understand why.

“Drinking with the Jocks” shows how little the band has changed since Grace began her transition. It would be easy to assume the lead singer coming out as transgender might significantly change the band’s dynamic or message, but it has really done the opposite: The message hasn’t changed, it’s just gained some specificity.

Fans who look back at Against Me!’s catalog may find some clues to Grace’s struggle, the most obvious appearing in “The Ocean” from “New Wave.” She sings, “If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman, my mother once told me she would have named me Laura.”

But what you’ll also find is an understanding that Grace is fighting the same things on “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” that she’s been fighting since the band’s first album in 2002, “Reinventing Axl Rose.”

On that album’s closing track, “8 Full Hours of Sleep,” Grace sings about shattering society’s lies and living in discomfort rather than blissful ignorance. The song is probably not about her gender identity, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s about finding the end to all kinds of inequality, all the ways society can make an individual feel somehow wrong. This is a common theme throughout the band’s career. The new album simply stops shrouding the message in vague metaphor and makes it more personal to the singer.

The best song on “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” is “F*CKMYLIFE666.” The lyrical content is still tinged with sadness, regret and discouragement. “Is your mother proud of your eyelashes, silicone chest and collagen lips? How would you even recognize me?” Grace sings.

But the music and melody are hopeful. It changes the way a listener hears the words. By the end of the song, you feel like Laura Jane Grace is going to be just fine.

Published on January 21, 2014 at 12:00 am

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