At near four-hours long, In The Grip Of Official Treason is immense and demanding. It requires a sharpness of ear and brain that most likely isn’t gonna hold out much further on first listen than the hilarious, scathing attack on Hilary Clinton and her “friends” near the end of the first disc - “These people are not our friends!”

What it requires is that the listening be spread out over three days - a day per disc - and even then, each disc in itself has so much goin’ on that the chances of picking it all up on one spin are nigh-on impossible. Too often the mind will bound towards this or that revelation or musing as a woebegone sailor to the sirens, and will reel around those rocks for maybe forty-five minutes, contemplating and assessing, before returning to the shore, only to find that the disc has ended, that the applause and the hooting has stilled and that nowt but the hiss of the radiators or the batterin’ of the wind at the windows and doors remains.

Again, that finger must be jabbed at the Play button. Again, for I’ve missed the entirety of the updated "Die For Oil, Sucker". Again, for I’ve missed that brilliant account of Jello’s visit to post-Katrina New Orleans. Again, for the stuff about Reconstructionism and theocracy and the coalition twixt the Christian Right and the Jewish Right has passed me by entirely.

Jello Biafra is a hero of mine and the only one that makes me feel guilty for such. The irony of it all - the idolised iconoclast…

He remains important, relevant, exciting, even when so many of his Old School peers (his old bandmates, for example), have fallen knackered to the dirt, content to deal in nowt more than nostalgia, set upon at the last by the wolves so gallantly held at (East) Bay (Ray) for so long.

The shift from red to blue - so beautifully lamented by Billy Bragg in the opening track of William Bloke a decade ago - is not, people like Jello Biafra (and indeed Bragg himself) constantly remind us, inevitable.

It is possible to retain the anger and the passion and the humanity of youth, yes, and to utilise those articles for so long as you’re capable of utilising anything, in the pursuit of great and wonderful things.

In The Grip Of Official Treason is a great and wonderful thing from which any amount of great and wonderful things might be wrought.

III

A Word About The Artwork

The first thing a fella notices about In The Grip Of Official Treason, long before he’s ever plucked a disc from out the bindings, is how extraordinarily beautiful those bindings are in themselves.

Folks weep and wail and gnash their teeth over the heads of the sundry casualties of the Download Era. Strewn left and right across the web, bloodied, begouged and degraded wrecks of creatures with names like Sound Quality and Artist Rights and Industry Green.