I didn’t understand why I started crying when I first listened to Against Me!’s 2014 album, Transgender Dysphoria Blues. It wasn’t my favorite Against Me! album, and it came after a string of mediocre “major label” records. But to be fair, I was in the shit – dealing with a deep depressive state that had lasted for years, working a job I hated, and coming to terms with what I then understood was my asexual orientation. I still liked Laura Jane Grace and her band, but it was clear I connected to songs like True Trans Soul Rebel or FuckMyLife666 on a slightly deeper level than the angst in the lyrics, or something.
Sometime between then and now, I realized I was agender. Nonbinary. I didn’t particularly feel like any gender; but I knew I didn’t… vibe? with maleness at all. Last year, I started asking my close friends – and y’all – to call me Kaile. I said, hey, pronounce it however you want. And you’ve been exceedingly kind to me in this regard, even if someone on reddit said I was mysterious. Sure, I guess! COVID was a fuck, I still felt depressed, but even these slight changes had a by-and-large positive effect on me. I genuinely feel better when people call me Kaile, when you use “they/them” in reference to me. I don’t even fucking have a gender, and yet I feel warm when y’all get my shit right (thank you). So, in short, I figured out why I cry when listening to Transgender Dysphoria Blues.
So I’m listening to We Are The Union’s fifth full-length album, Ordinary Life (Bad Time Records, 2021). And I can’t lie, it’s treading a lot of the same ground Transgender Dysphoria Blues did, almost by necessity – lead singer and guitarist Reade Wolcott came out as trans in the process of making and promoting this album – but in the ruts left behind by that predecessor record, WATU has found a lot of space to play.
Let’s start with the most obvious thing: this is a Ska-punk record, in 2021. And fuck you if you think that’s goofy, cliché or in any way lessens the quality of the record. I’ve been on the “Ska never died and has always been good, punks are just cowards” train for years, but I’m about to become absolutely fucking insufferable about it – Ska has never been better than it is right now, and you’re missing out on certified god damn bangers if you decide to dismiss it as “just fourth wave” or go for the tired and tasteless “music for hyperactive kids whose mozzarella sticks are done cooking” joke. But the thing is, it’s also not just Ska-punk – we’ve got old school rock-n-roll bops in here, straight up boi-band-flavored songs, modern emo and even some good ol’ midwestern pop-punk (in the style of, say, Dillinger Four) in the mix. Fuck me, there’s even a little Soundgarden in some of the guitar tones on this album. It’s a veritable fucking symphony of genre in here.
I mention this because I’m sure genre purists, like those who insist on gender and sexual binaries (to say nothing of the narratives generated by those binaries), will point to tracks like “Make It Easy” or “Boys Will Be Girls” or “December” as somehow disqualified from consideration as Ska songs because they don’t “do it right.” Ridiculous. Harebrained. If Ska is back (and it is/it never left), then We Are The Union is one of the genre’s principal acts, and Ordinary Life is an exemplar of the heights the genre can climb to, creatively speaking.
(As an aside, one thing that I would stress right now – and I hate that this even has to be done because we’re talking about Ska, you don’t have to do this with other genres – is that there are a bunch of really great Ska bands making music right now. Many of them share We Are The Union’s record label. I can, off the top of my head, recommend Catbite, Kill Lincoln, Bad Operation and Joystick!; there are dozens, if not hundreds, more where that came from, and they’re located around the world. The fate of Ska is not resting solely on We Are The Union’s shoulders [nor on the shoulders of We Are The Union’s trombonist, JER, who also does Ska Tune Network and has been pivotal in hyping Ska up online in the last few years].)
These tracks are well-written and composed, evocative, and fairly narratively coherent. They address love, heartbreak, working through mental health issues and gender fuckery, and none of them overstay their welcome. You ever get that urge to skip past a song you don’t like on an album you think is otherwise pretty good? Yeah, that didn’t happen for me at all on Ordinary Life. There are certainly standout tracks here – “Broken Brain,” “Big River” and the one-two emotional gut-punch of “Everything Alone” and “December” at the very end are just a few non-single examples – but even the weakest track, in my opinion, “Wasted,” is pretty good! It’s wild how high the hit-to-miss ratio is on this fucking album!
There truly are a lot of bangers on this album, and maybe at some point I’ll do a song-by-song listen-along and talk about how each track guts me in new and different ways, but the crown jewel on Ordinary Life, to me – the song that I would say pushes the album above its predecessors – is “December.”
“December” is not a sad song, but rather, it’s in a position of being almost funereal. It’s the kind of serious song that slaps you in the back of the head after a couple of goofy tracks on, say, a later Dillinger Four album and reminds you “hey buddy, we’re still in the world. and there are consequences to that.” Reade is sending off her former life – including over a decade chronicled by We Are The Union albums, tours and music videos – on this song. And at first the lyrics almost seem fatalist – “You’ll be dead in December” repeats a bunch, and it’s almost shocking to hear it for the first time – but like a few of the songs on this album, “December” unfolds from there and only reveals itself fully by the end. What we are left with, in the plainest spoken language possible: “You’re not who you think you are/ so let go of old ghosts/ and let your hair grow.”
I’m by no means ashamed to admit that I have cried reliably every single time I’ve listened to this song. And this time there’s no mystery, no hidden truth not yet discovered. Shit is sublime.
Go listen to Ordinary Life. It’s on all streaming platforms imaginable, you can buy vinyls at Bad Time Records, and pick it up digitally direct from the band on Bandcamp.