Against Me!

For Against Me! frontman Tom Gabel, sometimes you have to get the hell, out just to find your way back in. The past 12 years have seen Gabel rise from acoustic folk-punk gunslinger in the dives of Gainesville, Florida to releasing Against Me!’s four searing, blood-smeared slices of scrappy punk. The last of which, 2007’s New Wave, was the major label debut, one that Spin magazine anointed as their Album Of The Year. And while Gainesville was home, Gabel felt the walls closing in when touring for New Wave came to an end. So he split. With his wife, he left behind the “didja-hear-about-so-and-so” insular Gainesville world for the sleepy beach town of St. Augustine, wandering the streets and driving dusty back roads: searching, pining, hoping for inspiration. He found it in spades. The result is White Crosses, as powerful and as bold a rock record as one can imagine. The band -– Gabel, guitarist James Bowman, bassist Andrew Seward and new drummer George Rebelo – roar like fighter jets screaming over a stadium on the anthemic title-track (with its shout along line about smashing the 4,000 crosses on a local c... more...