At the Drive-In

Relationship of Command

Heard Here Rating:
"This is more electrifying than the chair."

Since when did Iggy Pop become the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for indie rock? He's guested on three near-perfect albums in recent years: Mogwai, Death in Vegas, and now the album at hand, At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command, where Iggy duets with frontman Cedric Bixler on the song "Rolodex Conspiracy." Well, I guess we need some way to weed out the weenies.

Take it as given that this is a great record, so let's get the bad stuff out of the way first. Yes, Cedric does resembles Rage Against the Machine's Zack De La Rocha in his spitfire vocal delivery, but this impression fades with multiple listens. Yes, the lyrics can be, er, more focused on aesthetic flow than actual meaning. And yes, it is often lumped in with emo.

But call it what you want: it's blazing punk rock with complex, inventive structures and a relentless energy that picks you up and throws you around for the better part of a day. The tight, driving chords aren't emo - no Sunny Day Real Estate open-chord dramatics here - so it must be the vocals, which can be a little overblown. But lead singer Cedric is a stunning presence live, and onstage the words themselves don't matter so much. Besides, the most gobbledygook song, "Invalid Litter Department," is actually one of the best - and for that you can thank the happyfried chorus of "Dancing on the corpses' ashes." Those choruses are what make the album and give it its drive, its heart. That and the guitars.

At the Drive-In - or their supporters, at any rate - continually insist that they are about rocknroll! and naught else. On repeated listens and live the problems above cease to trouble. Does it matter that they're the new "saviors of rock" along with And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, a band who they markedly (and wonderfully!) resemble? Does it matter that guitarist Omar says "I barely learned E-A-D-G-B-E last year"? Nope. It all just all makes it better, because there is true, real passion here.

Rock is dying and rock will be dead, which is perhaps why we're seeing a sudden explosion of amazing underground music. The only ones left are the true believers, the religious fanatics, the ones who look at a guitar and look at a wall and say, "I want to play what it sounds like when I hit that with that." These stragglers are the ones who can couple this destructive impulse with a realization of the beauty of both discord and melody, who can transfer that energy into the sound of exhilarating weightlessness. For ATDI, that gives you the brilliant riffs, angular yet strangely linear and traditional, of opener "Arcarsenal" for the former, and the singalongs of single "One Armed Scissor" for the latter.

At the Drive-In are the Stooges and the Pixies and Nirvana all rolled into one, and theymake everything else look like shit. It's that simple.