| Quick, pained, righteous. Everything that so-called aboveground punk rock, which is an oxymoron, can never be. Insightful and intelligent and funny -- not leftist-meeting-we-all-laugh-but-nobody-really-feels-amused funny but jokes-about-your-mom funny. Propagandhi places a premium on wit, so even their most brick-fisted moments (“Bullshit Politicians,” a classic punk song title if ever there was one) pack their worthy thoughts into cleverly compact phrases that erase the boundary between brute force and intelligent thought: “Every fucking day our cities tell us what they think of justice.” Six years of work have here resulted in songs as multifaceted and sharp as freshly cut diamonds. |