Redundancy Reigns On The Last Internationale's Debut

The Last International - "We Will Reign" [Epic Records]

While dozens of remarkably talented up and coming bands with profound, creative - and if not, at the very least, somewhat unique - things to express, struggle to market themselves and/or garner the attention of a major label, somehow The Last Internationale managed to rise above all of them, and then celebrated by pissing out this mediocre album of middle aged biker anthems.  Having ex-Rage Against The Machine drummer Brad Wilk in their personnel likely helped them get attention, and surely with producer Brendan O'Brien (Pearl Jam, Michael Penn.. he's got a decent resume) on deck to orchestrate the whole thing (strings were maybe pulled? Favors called in?), the label suits couldn't help but green light this belly flop by virtue alone.

The brass tacks: We Will Reign is a tepid "classic rock" sounding album that borrows more than it offers, stumbles more than it strides and bears with it the shame of a band touting a lot of clout over little content.

From the opening track, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Indian Blood", you get a pretty thorough summation of what this album has to say.  The song presents the Orwellian concept that "one does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship", as vocalist Delila Paz belts in her reedy Annie Lennox meets Florence Welch tone: "the seeds of revolution will grow tight around our children's necks, like nooses that are used to keep the slaves in check / And decades later we still can't figure out why it remains the same...".  The subsequent title track "We Will Reign" then goes on to say... well, the exact same thing: "We might have seen it all / We're building walls because we love to see them fall".  And this same principle is revisited on the 4th track "Killing Fields", the 5th track "Battleground" .... and yet again on the closing track "1968" - the latter most title possibly being a veiled reference to the infamous shootout between military police and the Black Panthers socialist party in April of that year - or maybe the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or any number of other Johnson Era unrests and resistances. A theme album concept is one thing, but dedicating five songs on a ten song album to an identical message is verbose, to say the least (hah! - PUN intended!), especially when the remaining tracks are left feeling alienated, random and disparate: three lover's soliloquys, a working man's lament, and one painfully ham fisted, but surely intended to be bittersweet, rock ballad ("Baby It's You"); the last mentioned's refrain worded in kitschy "white-trache" dialect: "It doesn't matter what they say, I know I'm gonna love you any old way....blah blah blah don't want nobody, cause baby it's you...".  

All this criticism aside, the basic song structures on We Will Reign's tracklist are all fundamentally boilerplate rock n' roll;  no different than you'd hear in any American dive bar or in any episode of Sons of Anarchy you choose.  You can sing along, fist pump, air guitar or dance drunkenly to any song on here until the bartender kicks you out, or you knock over Tig's beer and he beats your ass. These are stereotypical American outlaw anthems here that, vexatious and cliche as they might be, still appeal to a certain segment of the population (ref: all above made projections). Rock n' roll music was a revolution once upon a time, and while The Last Internationale can attempt to present themselves as juggernauts of the movement; their claims are imperious, their arsenal is lacking - and the only aspect of them that might be a reigning force to be reckoned with are their delusions of grandeur.