Strike anywhere.

WHEN IT'S MUSIC VERSUS GUNS, you'd better have brains and a durable heart. If you're a punk band, it's best to sound like there's an army backing you.

In the song "Sunset and 32nd," Strike Anywhere's vocalist, Thomas, wails "When they broke down the door and put their guns to the face of your wife and child, and as they pinned you to the floor...did you say, 'Officer, I am not resisting you'?"

Surrounding his voice, the band brandishes an arsenal of instruments--rushing, exact, pounding, and archly powerful. Scream along to the sound of impending detonation as it sizzles like a lit fuse. Strike Anywhere isn't merely a calculated academic exercise in positive resistance. "Sunset" is a song about cops following Thomas' neighbor home on a bike with diapers on the handlebars then arresting him on suspicion of drug trafficking, and Thomas rushing into the house after them. It's this closeness that makes Strike Anywhere vital. It's hard to fake the anxiety of having loaded revolvers pointed at your friend and seeing a family dissolve by police terror--in the name of American justice--right before your eyes.

There's more redemption. It's no longer Reagan's time. The bar has been raised. Politics are more complex, and socially involved bands just can't mimeograph the game plan of the Dead Kennedys or MDC without looking like a poorly-reproduced parody two-decades-old. Strike Anywhere's not merely a "Fuck the Government" band. Careful reading of the lyric sheet to Change Is a Sound reveals their reasoned, practical defiance isn't sewn to their clothing like a hastily stitched band patch. That all said, it don't mean dick if you can't rock out.

Bummed that Kid Dynamite broke up? Like melody with your '80s-tinged but totally updated, non-mosh, non-grab-yo-nuts hardcore? It'd be hard to go wrong with Strike Anywhere.