"Someone asked me how long the band was going to write and record a song a week. I said 'why would we stop?' Operating as a kind of op-ed piece in the form of a rock band, Los Angeles based Max and the Marginalized have been writing and recording a song a week and releasing them immediately on left-wing blog hub The Huffington Post and on their MySpace page.

In an age where the news cycle has sped up and the album cycle has slowed down, Max felt it was the only way to make relevant political music. "How can I write a song about the spinelessness of the current Congress for an album that will be out in three years?" Indeed, this is the problem with making political music - anytime a band comes forward with a lyric more specific than "F--k the system" they run the risk of being dated by the time the CDs are pressed. Bands write a song they like and hold onto it forever, trying to give it commercial momentum which can sometimes take months or years. Problem is, if you have something to say, there's no time for that.

The result is a staggering body of work that grows weekly, landing somewhere between Bad Religion, Ted Leo, The New York Times Opinion Page and The Daily Show. There's a firm base of satire in many of the songs ("Weeknights At Six", a scathing indictment of CNN anti-immigration host Lou Dobbs and "Dana, Dana", a guilty crush song for White House spokesperson and sexpot Dana Perino with lines like "The camera loves you more than the microphone" are perfect examples of this). Others touch on the real tragedy and injustice of the current war without resorting to vague and bleeding sentiment. Songs like "No Kisses No Cameras" is a chilling and thoughtful dirge about the Pentagon's policy of not allowing photographs of coffins of fallen soldiers. "Lectures For The Dying" explores the backwardness of abstinence-only education both here and in AIDS-ravaged Africa. The idea of making a real political impact is not far-fetched for Bernstein (his father, Carl Bernstein, is one half of the journalistic duo that exposed Watergate and brought down President Nixon.) While Max doesn't expect to have anything like that kind of impact, he does not believe there's anything naive about thinking that this music can make a difference. "People emailed me saying that they weren't against the death penalty until hearing 'Standing in the Driveway Holding Cardboard in the Rain'. That's reason enough to do this."

One might expect such heady fare to be long on rhetoric and short on fire - thankfully this is not the case. Musically, Max and the Marginalized channel the great high-energy acts of yore like The Replacements and The Jam, with a spontaneity that is sorely missing from the current crop of hyper-polished, meticulously crafted rock that dominates the basements and bars of America.

By the time you read this, there will have been more songs, and new ones every Thursday. 2008 will be a hell of a year in politics - it will now have a hell of a soundtrack. (read less)

"Someone asked me how long the band was going to write and record a song a week. I said 'why would we stop?' Operating as a kind of op-ed piece in the form of a rock band, Los Angeles based Max and the Marginalized have been writing and recording a song a week and releasing them immediately on left-wing blog hub The Huffington Post and on their MySpace page.

In an age where the news cycle has sped up and the album cycle has slowed down, Max felt it was the only way to make relevant political mu... (read more)