It has many forebears, but asked to name a music genre most associated with dissent you reckon for most punk would top any poll.
Futile arguments about which side of the Atlantic it began on will rage forever, but even though the British strain had its roots in an ironic joke about class, art and the nature of performance, globally it’s usefulness as a medium to project anger remains unequalled.
Rise Against began their career on the Chicago hardcore scene in the early noughties, before the decision to sign with a major left the notoriously judgmental punk community underwhelmed; their big-league debut Siren Song Of The Counter-Culture, however, kept the quartet’s new bosses unit-shiftingly happy whilst they held on to most of their anti-establishment virtues.
Nowhere Generation is their ninth album, four years out from their last outing, Wolves. Recorded in Colorado with longstanding engineer/producer Bill Stevenson, as you’d expect from such troubled times the quartet have a rich seam of injustice to wax polemical about, the messages delivered, Trojan Horse style, via a familiarly accessible chassis.
Opener The Numbers wastes little time establishing a tone and tempo which is pretty much unbroken throughout, and there’s plenty of business-as-usual method in the tumbling drum fills, power riffs and pick scraping.
At least there’s no attempt to hide the revolutionary zeal, singer Tim McIIrath letting rip with, ‘We’re biding time as we wait for the signal/Sharpening blades whilst we wait out the storm’, the kind of expression which, if society is not vigilant, he may be prevented from saying out loud in an authoritarian future.
McIIrath explains the over-arching philosophy behind Nowhere Generation as, ‘Today there is the promise of the American Dream, and then there is the reality of the American Dream…When the privileged climb the ladder of success and then burn it from the top, disruption becomes the only answer’, on the title-track he sums up this Boomer abandonment of successive generations with, ‘And this place used to be somewhere/But they sold it out from under us/Our voices all ignored’.
Similar disenchantment haunts Talking To Ourselves, about being neither seen or heard and over-compensating as a result, while the fist pumping Broken Dreams, Inc. rails at the fate of the little people being left behind at an ever-increasing rate.
The weight of picking up the pieces that are left behind by progress-as-a-juggernaut then haunts Forfeit, an acoustic interlude that, coming halfway through, feels like a moment by which to catch your thoughts, or breath, or both.
The restarted train then continues to grind on, consumerism locked in the crosshairs of Sooner Or Later, while closer Rules Of Play skitters over the dilemma of friendships within and across the widening ideological divides in their home country and beyond.
Whilst it’s hard to take issue with Rise Against’s sincerely held beliefs, whatever will be televised in the future, Nowhere Generation’s availability in several collectible formats does seem at odds with at least some of their wider movement’s confusing maze of virtues.
The real problem though is that unless an artist is willing to at least try and subvert the host then we may as well be back in the nineties, the golden age of melodic underground and a time where arguably it was needed less but meant more.
Sadly, Nowhere Generation just isn’t enough of a pain in the ass to trouble anybody behind a door in the corridors of power.