Customer Reviews

Rope a Dope

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4 star:		(1)
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I have been listening to Antietam for fifteen years now, and it's hard for me to believe they haven't yet found a wider audience. All of their albums are fine, and each one has a very distinct sound; the common thread is Tara Key's guitar, which is as instantly recognizable as any male guitar hero you'd care to name. Key is, without question, the best female guitarist of this or any decade. And on Rope-A-Dope, she cuts it loose. Sure, that squall has always been there (even on the low-key Burgoo), but it's never been as pummellingly beautiful as it is here. Check the last song, the ten-minute Silver Solace--between Key's vocal parts, she tears out molten lava streams of noise that alternately coalesce into recognizable forms and float off into the stratosphere. It's a powerfully moving song, and the music perfectly fits with the bitterness of the lyrics. Other delights: the hard, bluesy Hands Down (organ fills by Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo), the gorgeous yearning Pine, the quietly menacing Leave Home. There's not a bum track on this record, not even a lesser track. Buy it and make this band rich!

I first saw Antietam open for Yo La Tengo, at a small club in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I found myself wishing I was at an Antietam concert instead--I didn't ever want them to leave the stage.
Antietam rocked out harder than maybe any band I'd ever seen before. They might look like a bunch of truckers, and their lead singer/guitarist might look like a chain-smoking friend of your stepmom, but they sound like no one else. By the time Yo La Tengo took the stage, the entire crowd was sweat-drenched and exhausted and almost nothing Yo La Tengo could dish out met the high standard of true punk rock that Antietam had set.
I bought this album shortly after that show, and though it's not as intense or as loud as their live show, there are some great songs here.
"Rope-a-Dope" is a perfect CD to play incredibly loud speeding with the windows down, weaving in and out of traffic, cutting other cars off left and right. Listen to it when you're angry, or when you're feeling great, or when you're getting pumped to go out for a late night on the town. It's exciting, deep, intense, and unique.
I plan on getting Antietam's every album--and I'll definitely see them again live. They're terrific.

Antietam is a great band, and have been since their debut back in 1985 (speaking personally, a memorable year for me, in which I graduated college with a B.A. in sociology. I often found myself, particularly when browsing book and record shops, thinking about the politics and sociology of pop/rock/punk).

Here, the band proves, some ten years later, that they continued going strong through the 90s. Their sound is raw and great, and, put simply, they rock. Tara Key and company simply deliver the goods, and what wonderful goods they are.

One last note; TK is part of a really fine movie moment, playing, with my fave band Yo La Tengo, a version of the Velvet Underground in the movie I Shot Andy Warhol; like this movie, Antietam is smart, indy, very cool, underrated, and deeply satisfying.

If you like music, you'll like this album. You may most strongly feel respect with your first listen. But don't think that just because you respect it you can't get down and dirty with it. This transcends genre and annihilates almost every stereotype (especially the one claiming that girls can't play guitar). Buy it. It's worth the sum of all the cash you ever dished out for mainstream releases.