The Assassination Collective
A Million Fantastic Reasons...
8 Track, LP (2008, Afterdark Records)
Mixing music and politics is as fraught as building a fertiliser bomb - the result is likely to blow up in your own face if you’re not careful. Luckily, The Assassination Collective have steady hands and a lot of practice at this kind of thing. Having honed their skills in bands such as Jihad Against America, The Adults, Baseball and The Stabs, they know how to underpin their incendiary politics with solid rhythms, as well as a keen balance between punk-rock energy and melodic hooks.
Yes, the songs can get a bit wordy at times, but they never degenerate into sloganeering rants. Instead The Assassination Collective remember that there are as many viewpoints in the world as there are people and stay true to the old dictum that the personal can be political. When they talk about revolution they are referring to it both as a concrete uprising of the oppressed and a personal form of resistance against a culture of stupefaction.
Rather than merely proselytizing about equality, they practise what they preach, often swapping roles within the band, so that no one person is the dominant focus. With a rotating roster of three vocalists and two drummers, the result could easily be a mess, but the sound is as cohesive on A Million Fantastic Reasons … as it was on their debut Fight Or Assimilate And Die. The fact that they are now on a proper record label, the impeccably cool Afterdark Records, in no way dilutes their attack.
If indeed anger is an energy, as John Lydon once proclaimed, this band knows how to translate it into something that can be as thought provoking as it is fun.
by René Schaefer