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Album review: Against Me! continues challenging conventions on ‘Shape Shift With Me’

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Four stars

Against Me! Shape Shift With Me

The title of Against Me!’s seventh studio album, Shape Shift With Me, is more invitation than suggestion. Dating back to the band’s anarcho-punk and anti-folk origins—see 2001’s Crime EP or 2002’s Reinventing Axl Rose—leader Laura Jane Grace has forcibly pushed the boundaries of punk and pop, gradually giving her personal-is-political perspective a broader context.

Where 2014’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues centered on Grace’s experience coming out publicly as a transgender woman, its follow-up finds her less overtly political, this time focused on the challenges and excitement of forming new relationships and letting go of old ones. “Whatever direction takes me away from you, that’s the direction I wanna head in,” she sings on second track “12:03.” Grace’s depth of emotion is driven further by her band’s sonic chemistry—swift, boot-stomping percussion and ironclad guitars.

Shape Shift also plays like a dialogue on “radical softness,” a concept coined by artist and activist Lora Mathis. “[It's] the idea that unapologetically sharing your emotions is a political move—a way to combat the societal idea that feelings are a sign of weakness,” she told Hooligan magazine last year. Grace’s depth and vulnerability work symbiotically, and her identity, though not the album’s main subject, remains a thread throughout. “I wanna be more real than all the others/I wanna be more real than all the rest/I wanna be so real, you can see the difference,” she declares on “Delicate, Petite & Other Things I’ll Never Be.” The result feels radical in and of itself.

On Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Grace’s political candor and celebrity pushed her to the forefront of the trans movement. Shape Shift With Me is a candid successor, with Grace’s tender ferocity and vivid intention at the helm.

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