It was when I first listened to Year Of The Crow that I was reminded about how difficult it is to listen to some bands over your headphones while sitting down. This is not music to get mellow to folks - and while I do recommend sitting down with the lyric sheet at least once while listening to the disc - it was only when I plunked the disc into my archaic RCA portable disc player and went out into the snow this morning that I felt like I had enough space around me to appreciate what they were doing.
It's the type of music that you can really embarrass yourself with if you're not careful. You get so wrapped up in the songs, that you can find yourself all of a sudden singing along at the top of your lungs with a chorus or standing in the aisles of the grocery store pogoing while looking at the selection of cat treats.
First things first; if you've not heard them before and you've come to State Radio looking for Dispatch, well you're not going to find it here. Sure there are similarities, Chad wrote songs for both groups after all, but there's an edginess about the content and the presentation that I hadn't felt from Dispatch's music. While there was always some sort of social content in the earlier band's work, there was a lightness of tone that allowed for a wider audience appeal.
There's no way that anybody with any sympathies to the current administration is going to be able to listen to Year Of The Crow without having their beliefs called into question. Whether it's the condemnation of the whole Bush clan from grandpa down (he stole Geronimo's skull from its burial ground so he could use it in some fraternity initiation at Yale) in "Guantanamo", their homage to Dick Cheney's Halliburton war profiteering in "Gang Of Thieves", or their tribute to the fine work the CIA do to this day in destabilizing governments in South America on the song "CIA".
State Radio is far more reminiscent of the politicalized music of The Clash and similar bands of the late seventies and early eighties when they show this side. References to the Weather Underground in "Gang Of Thieves" makes it clear they also know that it takes more than platitudes to change the way things work. They're not advocating violence or anything like that (calm down Homeland Security) but they are saying there's nothing wrong with openly resisting what's going on in Washington right now.
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