The Singles Jukebox

About as hard to follow up Mitski as it is to write a protest song everyone likes…

[Video]
[4.90]

Alfred Soto: In the terse muscularity of the guitars and their yowl, Dead Sara sound like Pearl Jam this time out. Unlike PJ, though, “fuck Donald Trump” is no metaphor and it does nicely. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: Someone send Maynard a memo: see, you can make your political lyrics as clunky as you want, even a little self-righteous, if you just bother to write a fucking song to go with them.
[6]

Alex Clifton: Loud, angry, political, actually rockin’, and well-structured. Resisting through music has always been punk, and Dead Sara translate their rage beautifully into something that feels good and powerful to sing. It’s an adrenaline rush from start to finish, and for once it makes me glad to feel alive in the Darkest Political Timeline.
[8]

Nicholas Donohoue: Dead Sara is making the case both that conservatism is not the new punk rock and that the new punk rock is kinda lame.
[4]

Claire Biddles: The refrain “Fuck you, Donald Trump/Fuck you, everyone” made my eyes roll all the way back into my head — maybe the misguided nihilism would be less annoying if the song actually went, but it’s just a dull rehash of every hard rock cliche since the ’90s.
[2]

Will Rivitz: Like most hard-rock songs of its ilk, the lyrics suck (think Green Day on “Holiday” but worse), but like most hard-rock songs of its ilk, that doesn’t really matter. Forget layers of fuzz – “Unamerican” is a two-ton concrete slab of fuzz, tinny production pulling everything high and low towards a focused midrange band of pummeling soot and vocals glowering with exactly the same timbre as the lead guitar. Ears are boxed, grooves are had, floors are stomped. 
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Loud buzz, loud melody, and attitude borrowed from about ten different songs, Trump-era and otherwise. The first two still get you pretty far.
[6]

Tim de Reuse: Parts of this are well-composed: it’s got the fuzz, it’s got the “yeah yeah-yeah yeah”s, and it’s got a few punchy, insightful lines. (The trend does seem to be that women can only be truly virtuous Americans while occupying the roles of “daughter” or “wife who doesn’t make a fuss about anything,” huh?) But there are elements that don’t make any sense: the repeats that drag out what ought to have been a hi-energy sucker punch, the phoned-in self-serious bridge with no apparent thematic point, the “fuck you, Donald Trump / fuck this, fuck everyone” too on-the-nose to be emotionally convincing. Like, I’m frustrated too, I get it! I grew up in a red state and I wanted to “be an alien” so bad I moved to Canada. But there are way more pressing, interesting, and catchy reasons for that than the catch-all of “fuck everyone,” which, as sincere as it feels when you shout it into a microphone, is too generic a sentiment to act as an effective indictment of modern American patriotism.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: I loved Dead Sara’s “Weatherman” so much in 2012 that I muscled it into that year’s Amnesty, and I still love its righteous, knotted-funk fury. But I’ve never loved anything else they ever recorded, and this least of all. Yes, of course, fuck Donald Trump, and fuck America, and maybe there are teenagers who will hear this and feel like the world’s broken open for the first time, but Godddddddd, this is the equivalent of a pink pussy hat at a Black Lives Matter rally.
[3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Trump wins this one.
[2]