Record (Re)Collection – Fest 7 Edition: Chris Vandeviver Of Sakes Alive!! On Crime In Stereo’s “The Troubled Stateside”

For this installment of the Record (Re)Collection-Fest 7 Edition, Chris Vandeviver of Sakes Alive!! writes about Crime In Stereo‘s 2006 full-length The Troubled Stateside. We highly recommend that you check out SA!!’s brand new 7-inch Act I and that you go see them at The Fest 7. They will definitely be one of the highlights. Read on. 

Crime In Stereo - The Troubled Stateside
By Chris Vandeviver

I know it seems like an older record would make sense for a Record Re-Collection. And honestly, D4′s Midwestern Songs and Circle Takes the Square’s As the Roots Undo immediately jumped at me. However, these monumental albums are obvious tomes. Crime In Stereo’s Nitro effort, though, doesn’t strike me as obvious as the aforementioned. My life, however, was brought back full circle due to this brilliant album.

Imagine the image of this modern (young) man: forty hours a week at shitty, near minimum wage hell; walking half an hour each morning at 5:30 a.m. to work, and 2:30 p.m. home to being tired as hell; no direction, and musical efforts imploding to ego-maniacal twenty year olds; your roommate fucks up and sends your rent money to his school loan collector, and by the time you find out you are being served an eviction notice, thus forcing you to return to the parents that you try so hard to avoid. Did I mention life sucked? Cause it did.

Read more after the jump.

My buddy Pat went on tour with No Trigger for the 2006 Warped Tour, and he managed to snag a couple copies of The Trouble Stateside from Crime In Stereo. Pat gave me a call and asked if I would be into having a copy. Sure, why the hell not? I can’t afford records at all, so free ones are exciting. Nitro seemed like they found some taste and were signing some decent bands these days.

Probably on some late night Denny’s hangouts, Pat dropped me the CD. When I popped the record on, and the first track “Everything Changes” slammed into me, I was like, “holy fuck!” Seriously, I immediately was grabbed by it. The record was pissed, yet melodic. Self-aware but globally minded. Poetic, but free of pretense.

The Troubled Stateside brought punk rock idealistically back to the forefront of my conscious. When the singer, Kristian Hallbert, states in the first five seconds, “Home: Embrace the concept, can’t afford the place,” immediately I knew this record implied to me. It was not a record that spoke of obscure, overseas battles that I would never see (as long as I proved to not be stupid enough to join overseas conflicts). It spoke of the powers, that be ebbing and creeping, pulling and seeping into every stretch of life you experience. “The long knives of the night” cutting and stabbing through you. How your conscious can so easily succumb to the struggle of day to day life, leaving you vulnerable. If there were ever a record to get someone pissed as hell and reinvigorated, this was the record.

It’s so worth reiterating the last lyrics of the the record’s final track, “I Stateside”: ”So we’re all going to hell, but with one hell of a plan. Presented in folded flags, embedded in foreign sand, written upon the skin of a dried-up land, it began: “We’ll fix the fat and ugly with incisions. We’ll stash the gay and liberal up in New England. We’ll keep the black and poor in (or under constant threat of) prison. And they’ll all feel blessed just for being a part of the vision. God, please save these troubled states.”

From then on, I remembered the reasons I became drawn to punk rock. That the weariness I feel day to day is not simply “life,” but a scheme of cards stacked against us. The anger that burns in me is worthy indignation for a world’s worth of assholes. Goddamn, life is worth being as irrationally irritable to the stream of car culture, cancer-cluster, neo-nazi, “freedom” pedaling hosts and parasites.

This record gave me back the answers I needed. Now I’m fervently committed to being pissed. That’s why The Troubled Stateside deserves this type of highlight.