AGNOSTIC FRONT
Dead Yuppies (Epitaph)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale

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Agnostic Front closes out 2 decades of musical mayhem as tight as they wanna be, as loose as they choose to be and as hardcore as they've ever been. On Dead Yuppies they continue to hold the punk rock torch high, delivering the kind of music you should expect from the scene's elder statesmen.

Musically, they're still cranking out pure NYC hardcore thrash. Guitarist Vinny Stigma roars over the tough rhythms laid down by bassist Mike Gallo and drummer James Collette, who are one of the most enduring rhythm tandems in rock of any genre. Most amazing, perhaps, is the fact that vocalist Roger Miret has any voice at all after twenty years of this. He's a classic hardcore shouter, a style that's been known to wear out singers in a matter of months, let alone decades. Miret is a man with something to sing about, though, and he delivers his message with impressive power and clarity.

What he's singing about is the most important thing about this release. In a country with a new, if only vaguely defined, war going on, there's a natural sense of national unity, a tendency to set aside some of the less important things that separate us in more placid times. There are still people out there who look to divide us, though, by age, class, race, gender and dozens of other distinctions, real and imagined. They do it because they profit from it, at the expense of all of us. In times like these, we need people to call bullshit on the bullshit profiteers more than ever, and that's just what Agnostic Front do in track after track of classic punk anti-authoritarian rants. They might not appreciate the notion (then again, they're smart guys; they might appreciate it a lot), but in its way, Dead Yuppies is more patriotic than a mountain of Lee Greenwood CDs. Oh yeah, it also fucking rocks.

Track List:

I Wanna Know * Out Of Reach * Everybody's A Critic * Liberty * Club Girl * Uncle Sam * Urban Decadance * Love To Be Hated * No Mercy * Politician * Pedophile * Alright * Dead Yuppies * Standing On My Own

© 2002 - Shaun Dale