Dynamite!  A Right Here, Right now, this is What you should be Listening to, with just a touch of Glam Rock Swagger.  I specifically Like the confidence of the Performances.
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You can make the case that wartime bands and music carry the most weight and hold up the most accurate mirror to its society.  If your case contains the music of Bob Dylan, late-60's Beatles, or What's Going On? then you've got a pretty good argument.  So what are today's bands saying about where we are and where we're going?  Most bands conceived the few years before and after 9/11 aren't as blatantly "anti-war" as the Vedder's and Stipe's (or Coyne's for that matter), but can express it in new, subtler, more narrative ways.  Just as Dylan used folk music to tell universal stories of struggle that caught a counterculture's attention, today's bands are passing along old folktales of greed and loss, (The Decemberists' magical The Crane Wife) and lies and emptiness (So Divided, the aptly titled ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of the Dead latest album).       
        Following in tow, the sophomore album of Chicago's Air This Side of Caution, Nature Will Turn On Us, takes a sonic journey through a charred landscape of a vacuous America. "Here We Go" invokes Enron and white collar America as they go "crusin' for loopholes" and keep "growing like a weed." The irony soaked "Picture Perfect" contrasts its own catchiness as singer John Raine paints an empty world where nothing is more than skin deep.  These thoughts and notions aren't breaking news, but they do paint a bleaker picture of world that ATSOC used to see more idealized in their debut effort on 2002's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  Furthermore, they have tightened up their sound.  JKid’s soaring guitar solo's still resonate (none more brilliantly than in "Details & Structures"), but they complement the songs more now rather than being separate, longer entities.  And rightfully so.  ATSOC has more to say lyrically now.  Is there any hope?  Indeed, we're not dealing with doomsayers. "What's Beyond the Sky?" points to a more heightened sense of awareness, "estranged from the real world." It points to a transcendence, to "wonder what's beyond the sky" instead of dwelling on the everyday horrors that make you very afraid for now and tomorrow.
        The album's opener "Vanilla Sky" forecasts the mood and vibe of the album. "Am I dead or have I just lost track of time?" Raine asks in the opening lines, signaling an awakening.  But the world awakened to is sick, dying. "Please wake up and find a cure," Raine pleads to God in "Details & Structures".  Nature Will Turn On Us doesn't let you off the hook, ending with the brooding "Listen to this at Night" which recalls the Animals "House of the Rising Sun." The cloud over the world the band paints is troubling and very real and frightening, but for Air This Side of Caution itself it marks the arrival of a very bright and promising future.
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