When you think of Anti-Flag you do not think of acoustic music. During their career which has spanned over three decades the band has been known for their true form of punk music – music that says exactly what is on the bands mind when it comes to politics and activism. For many punk bands they are a saviour in a world where punk music began to lose its edge.
And yes while you might not associate Anti-Flag with acoustic music they have decided to close out their brilliant American series of albums with American Reckoning which sees them deliver acoustic versions of tracks of their past few albums plus some covers of artists such as John Lennon and Cheap Trick. To see why Anti-Flag decided to take the acoustic route with American Reckoning we sat down for a chat with drummer Pat Thetic.
“Well the main focus for me was the cover songs,” says Pat as he talks about why American Reckoning ended up being an acoustic album. “I love those songs, like I thought Gimme Some Truth in 2018 is a very apt song and so we recorded the cover songs and then we were like ‘oh well let’s do some acoustic songs with them and release it as a piece’ because we thought American Fall and American Spring were a concept piece that we were putting together and we thought that this would be an end to it if we put those cover songs together with some other songs and make it a whole trilogy of records, so that was the main focus of it.”
“Well it really puts an emphasis on the lyrics,” explains Pat when the conversation switches to what it felt like to strip back these songs and play them acoustically. “A good acoustic song lives and dies by the lyrics. We are very proud of the text of our songs and we believe that there are very important lyrics in them and we wanted people to hear them, so it is not so much about the importance of recording them but more about the importance of listening back to them and being like ‘yeah that is what we were trying to get at and now people can really understand that.’ That was really important to us.”
American Reckoning is out through Spinefarm Records on the 28th September.
