The Oswald Effect, Love & Sabotage

It seems like everyone wants to be Muse these days. Well, there are worse bands you could emulate. Unlike Muse, however, Love & Sabotage by The Oswald Effect rarely worships at any other altar than that of the god of energetically empty political pretension. Four-fifths of the album is a fiery condemnation of the war in Iraq long after such sentiments could have any consequence at all. The death of true protest music and the power of song over politics has never been more apparent than in this annoyingly commercial and formulaic rock album.

Without even the tiniest bit of personal perspective, The Oswald Effect lets you, the listener, know that war is a bad thing. People die in it, you know? And hey, the government is lying, too! Well, they’re not going to take that lying down, no sir. They’re going to yell it from the rooftops, and hey, they don’t care if the Bush administration rounds them up and shoots them for treason (it could happen). No, The Oswald Effect are rebels, and for just $8.00, you can hear all about it. Don’t forget to show the world you’re a rebel, too, by dropping ten bones on a t-shirt, as well.

I believe truly in the power of music, and I also believe that artists have an obligation to comment on current events. But Love & Sabotage is not social commentary. It’s a marketing scheme. The band might as well be saying “beer taste good” and “sex is a carnival ride.” What we have here is MTV and Hot Topic manufacturing counterculture.

Look, it would be a perfectly listenable rock album if the message was personal instead of smugly anti-American. The guitar work on the album is incendiary. The work between Heath Bauer and Joshua Shepherd is like a mix between Dimebag and The Edge. Even when Bauer’s mean-suburban-streets voice impedes the tracks’ escape velocity, the dual six-string juggernauts are usually enough to at least hit high orbit. And take a song like “The Most beautiful Spacesuit” — it’s a highly emotional poem on love, sex, and family, which comes across honest and invocative of old-school U2. It’s a shining moment that transcends the rest of the album’s mass of impotent anti-war gobbledygook. If it was playing on the radio, I wouldn’t change the station. Might even turn it up a bit.

It’s these open moments, revealing the emotions behind the current state of the world, that are infinitely more illuminating than baldly stating the current status quo using the same parameters of music production and composition utilized in propaganda by your supposed enemy. For the majority of Love & Sabotage, the only difference between it and all it claims to oppose are the words. In the end, though The Oswald Effect affects to be more than just a band, they are just a band pretending to be more than just a band.