How can we recognize the impostors? Trust the auditory evidence. Consult our extensive reference files, such as the series of albums between 2002's Reinventing Axl Rose and 2005's As the Eternal Cowboy. These records flipped easily between acoustic and electric, every note naked, direct, and in-the-flesh, with frontman Tom Gabel's voice naturally overdriven with emotion as he decried charlatanism and falsity in every form. Even the band's relatively glossy major-label debut, 2007's New Wave -- simultaneously ballyhooed by the MSM as a bracing mainstream-rock record and pooh-poohed by trad-punk gatekeepers as an over-produced sellout -- was still recognizable as a product of the Gabel brain, obsessed as it was with castigating superficial musicians and bemoaning soulless American culture.
But one listen to the new White Crosses will convince even the least savvy listener: this is clearly not the same Gabel. The vocals are wiped clean of nearly all expressivity. The instruments sound as filtered and untouchable as light from a distant star cluster, their color spectrum reduced to various shades of beige. And some of the lyrical sentiments (e.g., "I Was a Teenage Anarchist") denounce all previous political statements so strongly that one simply must believe Gabel's heart has been forcibly swapped for a synthetic duplicate. With its artificially processed exterior and calculated reversal of emotion, White Crosses represents the latest advance in Stepford Music, as far removed from prior Against Me! records as Starship's "We Built This City" was from Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." It's almost wholly unrecognizable.
As for the real, original Tom Gabel? Let's hope he doesn't try to visit San Francisco while his Pod replacement is here. Everyone knows Pod People have terrifying ways of descrying the unassimilated....
