For the second instalment of Track Of The Week I’m going with a track by a band that I used to love, but due to their change in style and growth in popularity (and my own changes) my enjoyment has admittedly fallen.
Anyway, the band is Rise Against, starting off with a hardcore sound on debut album ‘The Unraveling’, Rise gradually transformed into what they are now, which is one of the biggest punk bands of the modern era, maybe ever, alongside acts like Green Day and My Chemical Romance.
Initially released on the Fat Wreck Chords exclusive 7" titled simply 'Rise Against' along with fellow b-side "Voice Of Dissent", “Grammatizator” is quite easily Rise Against’s hardest, most ferocious track to date, drawing the same sort of intensity that was heard on ‘The Unraveling’ and ‘Revolutions Per Minute’, it’s the musical equivalent of a head-on car smash!
Clocking in at 2 minutes and 9, this song is not a short one, for such a hard-hitting song taken from the same vein as 80s hardcore legends like Black Flag and Minor Threat, you’d expect the song to be short and snappy. What Rise have done is take the rawness from their early years and meld it what with Tim McIlrath (lead singer/founding member) has become one of the best in punk music at, melody. This song has tune, it has structure and purpose; it isn’t just thrashing noise, no on multiple listens and to the musically educated, you can see that every beat, every guitar chug and every bass slam is precise and is where it’s at for a certain reason.
Frankly, it may be the most polished hardcore song ever.
Something that’s worth to note is the fact that this song was written during the ‘Appeal To Reason’ sessions in 2007/8, the album which many believe to be the start of Rise’s assentation (or decline depending on your taste) into the mainstream where their sound seemed more inspired by what was considered ‘punk’ by the radio and television (i.e. Green Day, Sum 41, ect), and less inspired by what is considered ‘punk’ by purists. This certainly explains the polish of the track, but the rawness, honestly I’m not too sure where it fits in, heck sounds like it was lifted straight from the 2003 ‘Revolutions Per Minute’ album.
Now actually more onto the song itself, another thing to point out is the title, I for one love it but like maybe everyone ever, I have never been 100% with how to pronounce it; taken from the Roald Dahl short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” this track pretty much compresses this 21 page short story into a musical marvel. It details the struggles of a small-time writer/inventor who is stuck in writer’s block until they devise a plan to invent a machine that would create the perfect story. With this invention the writer’s fortunes turn, making him the richest and most powerful writer in the world, at which point the writer begins to buy-off the struggling writers’ names for use on his machine-created stories. These writers then must decide whether to give in to these “golden contracts” or continue to struggle in life.
The story, though having an almost child-friendly nature to the majority of it, the ending themes totally change it into a dark tale about how much is enough for someone to sell their soul.
The lyrics of the song make multiple references to the story and these darker themes, as well as actually using lines directly from the book (“God grant me the strength to let my children starve”). This was the perfect subject matter for Rise Against to tackle, a band that is known for being very politically driven, the topic of selling out was ripe for the band to address, and to do so by referencing this short story shows that they are a band that does their homework and that aren’t afraid to bring in help from outsiders if it gets their message across.
One of the most appealing aspects of this song is the bands return to a heavier sound, though it didn’t rub-off on other tracks since, this track does go to show that Rise Against can still produce a heavy train-wreck of a song when they want to, and with a new album on the way (hopefully) sooner rather than later, we can all hope that maybe we might see “Grammatizator” influence some future tracks.
"Grammatizator" will be released on the upcoming B-sides and covers album 'Long Forgotten Songs', which hits stores on the 10th of September, but you can pre-order the album digitally on iTunes via the link below, and you can buy it physically on pretty much any music webstore, with RiseAgainst.com having exclusive numbered bundles.
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