Review:

on 2008-03-12 Rahgwood Said:

There is one feeling that unifies us all, to love and be loved, and one that tears us apart, how we can hate. Love can, however, spread discord, cause pain, and hate can be pure and innocent. This is an album of righteous hate, not directed at anyone(Well, maybe Thatcher, but she doesn't count) but at our folly. "Everything that we write is a love song."
Crass is a powerful indicator of the decline of the peace movement in the west. They come off quite jaded, but hope was not lost yet. The years of struggle the world had seen for pacifism still coming to nothing, and the inevitable co-opting of all counter culture movements drives the frustration and violent rage that fuels the thrashing power of their rhythms and riffs. Despondency and apathy is fought off just barely in "What did you know? What did you care?" and "What if I told you to Fxxk off?", keeping their outcry from becoming mere tantrums. The indignation Crass felt was pronounced from morally higher ground.
The problem, however, is that with Crass one can see how the music of peace was being driven farther from the public forum that it had captivated in the sixties; who was crass targeting as an audience? The free form style of "Yes, Sir, I Will" is not calculated to be very inviting to the common listener. Indeed, the very vehemence the album captures so vividly struck the majority of early eighties listeners as grating and, well, crass. That is if any of them would ever have bothered to even give the album a listen. It seems that people did not want to be struck so powerfully with this musical expressionism, to be kicked out of their complacency by music that not only lyrically captured the atrocity that war should be to the rational mind, but sonically did so as well. Crass evokes a teeth gritting furor against war and provides an emotional context that many anti-war songs had been previously lacking in their jangly playfulness.
The sad fact is that Crass' goals were left unaccomplished and their legacy, for the most part, unsucceeded. The passion of Crass was too strong for the slender threads that held them together. These threads, stuck between the outward pressure of the enemies that passion had begotten and the prideful power itself, snapped. In the liner notes for "Best Before" they state, "We had become bitter where once we had been joyful, pessimistic where once optimism had been our cause." In this album one can see how their long struggle had now become in someways a struggle to contain themselves from disintegration into worn-out husks of redundant rebellion.
If pacifists were to wage war, what better way than through music? It is violent without hurting, it is overwhelming without desensitizing, and it is immediate without irresponsiveness. Music has its heroes and casualties, its camps and fraternities, but it does not dawn the garments of tribal blood or build the crowd into a tool. Music is an ecstasy, a war that fights for the widening of ears and the opening of mouths. If this war is ever to be taken up in earnest, "Yes, Sir, I Will" will be a bomb surrounded by sidearm ammunition.
Rating: 10/10