What do you do when your hipster-approved punk band ascends from relative obscurity to widespread commercial success? If you're Against Me! frontman Tom Gabel, whose Gainesville band blew up with last year's excellent full-length New Wave — and its catchy party-girl-grown-old hit single "Thrash Unreal" — you return to your folk roots and issue the ass stomping, street cred bolstering, solo EP Heart Burns, which we first reported here.
Over mostly strident acoustic guitar strumming, the bear-voiced singer bellows about familiar themes like the casualties of war, cramming words like "xenophobia" and "ennobled" into pop songs — making it sound nearly as natural as rhyming "moon" and "spoon." No small feat.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2008.