AOTY #4: Against Me! - Transgender Dysphoria Blues

Against Me! fans will tell you, we thought that the band was dead (at least as a studio outfit). The record just prior to Transgender Dysphoria Blues, 2010’s White Crosses, had a handful of good songs on it (eg. the undeniable fist-pump bliss of “I Was A Teenage Anarchist”), but for the most part represented the nadir of Laura Jane Grace’s songwriting and performance (witness the mindbogglingly literal lyric, “The dynamic to the relationship never changes”; thanks, Dr. Phil). So we all sat around and bashed the band for, like, five years...

Imagine how shitty we felt when we all learned why the music had been so devoid of life—Laura had been dealing with a depression that nearly took her life. When she confirmed her gender in 2012, as many cis people are, I was new to the whole idea of being transgender, and felt like I was mourning the band I’d known for more than a decade. But that passed and then I thought, imagine what a tour-de-force it’ll be when she gets this stuff out in song

And I wasn’t wrong. Musically, Transgender Dysphoria Blues is classy, sophisticated, and cheerful pop-punk, one song after another redolent of James Bowman’s Goldtop Les Pauls and Laura’s beloved Rickenbackers chiming out of a wall of Vox AC30 amps. But lyrically, there isn’t a Norwegian black metal record bleaker, a grindcore record more brutal, than the emotion here. We’re talking slit wrists, dead friends, dying marriages, cut-off fingers, caved-in skulls. It’s as if all the darkness in Grace had been stewing, fermenting, congealing, and finally exploded out into the written word here

If you happen to be transgender—as approximately 700,000 Americans do—then I can only imagine that Transgender Dysphoria Blues will be so intensely personal that you’ll be moved to tears. But there’s a certain kind of album that takes an idiosyncratic experience, puts it under the magnifying glass, and universalizes it, so that anyone can relate to lyrics that are in reality very disparate from their own experience. The incredible thing, that pushes the record into Will-Graham-like levels of empathy, is that TDB will floor you even if you’re not transgender. Let this album in, and you will not be the same person when you’re done listening

- Wild Rose Chance

Only three albums left! Come back tomorrow for #3 and catch up on the rest of the list so far