is a Rock review, commentary on a Bay Area band's most recent release.



February 16, 2007 From the cover one can't tell if "Officer Down" is band name, album title, or merely a questionable hope. A friend in New York City bragged, “Only in San Francisco would anyone still care about killing cops.” His swaggering suggestion that police as pigs, punk rock, and San Francisco are all anachronisms sadly has truth. The chance that any of these will change the world has diminished. But that's not the point.

Officer Down’s lamentation against officialism is slathered on both sides by dual creamy hard-panned rhythm guitars. These twin independent interpretations of the beat underscore the lyrics of J. Mills with a lovely envelope of youthful rebellion and punctuated urgency. One feels safe inside this womb of sound. The immersive energy of this punk metal four-piece easily transports listeners to that goal of Rock’n’Roll, the vaunted “happy” place where the outside world no longer matters. It is to the great credit of this effort that Mills refuses to let us languish inside his band’s obvious love of sound. For in that frisson between harmony and hell, between the band’s trance-inducing unity and Mill’s tirade against political modernity, this band shines.

The recording is best when the two-guitar dialectic is focused on rhythm. The rare solos are a disappointment, not because of any failure on the part of the instrumentalists; rather there seems to have been a lack of attention paid in the after-tracking process to generating a solo spectral richness equivalent to that achieved for the rhythm guitars. There are a few other inconsistencies. . .

The black and white cover presents a swashbuckling pirate scene. With arms securely bound, a plank-walking, sad-faced cop­who is, incidentally, standing up, not down­is drawn larger and more prominently than everyone else around him. Dangerous brigands scurry about the background, but it is the officer who is shown closest to us. We see this is his last moment. We feel a sense of pity for the poor cop, who is obviously about to be martyred.

The back cover may be more on target. Here an empty staircase leads up towards Russian Hill, perhaps a hill climb toward the gallows suggestion of the opening track, “Hang ‘em High.” Officially, and since officers are the named concern of this band, officialdom is a good place to start; officially, the first words of this first song are, “Wasted my time.” I know this because the lyrics for each song are thoughtfully hand-lettered inside the eight-page booklet; before I even shoved the CD in the slot, I found this opening three word prognostication. I feared the worst. The worst came; it proved to be our dear President Bush whose candid thoughts are collaged in as intro for the opening track. In “Hang ‘em High,” Mills asserts that the “protesting game” is “wasting my time.” It is easy to agree with Mr. Mills both that voting is a waste of time and that it’s not just Bush; there are a number of warmongers in our current administration that need to be hanged. I keep getting hung-up on the ironically recursive idea that this song is just another example of the “protesting game” Mills laments.

In spite of the occasionally hypocritical lyrics­such as having hip young males complain that it’s the cops who are “armed by testosterone”­this album works consistently in every one of its anarchic tracks. Be warned that there are three or four filler tracks in the middle of this work that waver from Mill’s anti-establishment rage into the singer-songwriter territory of moralizing and story-telling. Ignore them. They’re not the message. You’ll find that what you crave is Officer Down’s mesmerizing political spunk.