Photo of Laura Jane Grace In The Trauma Tropes by Pinelopi Gerasimou.
A song called “Your God (God’s Dick)” introduced the period in anticipation of the new album from prominent punk musician and former Against Me! singer-guitarist Laura Jane Grace. Adventure Club, which she has put out under the name Laura Jane Grace In The Trauma Tropes, is a side project that involves wife Paris Campbell Grace, Jacopo “Jack” Focas, and Orestis Lagadinos, and it came from an Onassis Foundation Fellowship grant that brought Grace and co. to Greece. There, the collaborators crafted this very 2020s punk album of 12 tracks that cross into folky, poppy, and bluesy genres.
Towards the beginning of this year, Grace appeared in headlines after she performed her then-recently-released “Your God (God’s Dick)” at one of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy rallies. Right-wingers responded to lyrics “Does your God have a big fat dick ‘cause it feels like he’s fucking me” adversely, calling the song “anti-Christian.” The artist said in a Rolling Stone interview, “I’m not being profane to be profane,” as she questioned the conflation between religion, gender identity, and the politics that binarize the two subjects.
The first track of Adventure Club, “WWIII Revisited,” also directly calls upon the current state of affairs with a punchy tune that combines Grace’s solo vocals for certain lines with group chanting. Everyone joins together for the chorus of, “I don’t want to die in World War Three/ I don’t want to kill for blood money.” In both the middle and the end of the piece, energetic conversation happens in the background. Altogether, this introductory song to Adventure Club — also the shortest at one minute and 24 seconds — takes a punky tone, one of collective dissent against a wrong, to announce the work as a whole.
“Wearing Black,” second anthem of the studio album and a powerful single to be released during Pride Month, uses repetition of the titular words to lay a claim about gay pride. Though Grace supports the optimistic vibe through the songwriting (“The sun is shining, it’s a beautiful day/ All the queens are coming out to play”), she also recalls Pride’s origin and, again the present political contexts (“I’ll wear my rainbow another day/ My pride’s a riot, it’s not a parade.”) thus giving the effect of “Wearing black to the pride parade.”
Grace reaches personal emotions of anxious, internal desperation in fourth track “Active Trauma.” With oscillating guitar notes and Paris Campbell Grace’s raspy, howling backing vocals, the musical elements build a sense of both physical and mental shaking. Lyrically, the artist plays with and then subverts expectations: “I suffer from a breath that I can’t breathe, a constant panic beyond my understanding.” Fitting in with the album’s feelings of contemporary anguish, “Active Trauma” ends with lines about running until your body breaks and an image of burning a house, which could be interpreted perhaps as burning the problems within oneself, the country, or one’s actual home.
Continuing the trend of being topical, “Fuck You Harry Potter” is the title of Adventure Club’s eighth song that begins with heavy, classic rock ‘n’ roll guitars paired with repetitive drumming. Grace, a transwoman, likely responds to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s recent celebration of anti-trans policy in the lines, “I ain’t nobody that I haven’t been, I ain’t nobody now/ I ain’t nobody that I haven’t been, not to you anyhow.” The musician combines scream-singing with calm, warm tones of vocalizing with an almost folk bend.
The longest track off of this album, coming in at three minutes and 25 seconds instead of the usual one- or two-minute range, also ends it: “Walls” repeats the lines “They built walls around me” and “They took my life away” with a trade-off of raspier and cleaner vocals. In the first part of the song, dismayed lyricism in addition to the trapped imagery recalls early heavy country, such as the likes of Johnny Cash. Yet, the chorus uniquely lends itself to what can be imagined as a crowd call-and-response with a lead-up from “They built walls around,” with everyone crying out with their own, “me.”
Adventure Club incorporates more upbeat pop-infused tunes along with heavier melodies that involve the blues. As a whole, Laura Jane Grace utilizes the work to comment on a combination of personal feelings and political outpouring. She creates a relatable yell-along album that marks the current age. | Krista Spies
