The title track of Misery Index’s 2008 album Traitors was perhaps the first truly great anti-Bush song. Granted, it certainly wasn’t the first anti-Bush song (hell, Al Jourgensen decided to wrap up Ministry‘s career with a trilogy of albums dedicated to them), but most of the others felt like empty sloganeering even if their heart was in it. But something about “Traitors” hit home particularly hard, perhaps because instead of aiming white-hot rage at Bush’s lies and hypocrisies and his party’s Eisenhower-era morality, there was a weariness with it, a genuine disdain for decades of Neocon rule and the culture of “real America” that surfaced in its wake (bassist/vocalist Jason Netherton barking the final lyrics “and not through them defined by fucking flags on SUVs and Super Bowl half times” before chanting “traitors” for the remainder of the song). Instead of capturing the anger in the heat of the moment, in 2 ½ minutes, the band dig into the Earth to the root of their disgust through an incendiary metallic hardcore song. So, fittingly, Traitors was released a little more than a month before Bush was out of office for good. In theory, it was too little, too late. In fact, now that Bush has been gone for about a year and a half (and, sorry Keith Olbermann, but we don’t need any more anti-Bush songs), the song still has a feeling of relevance, like all good protest songs do from Dylan to Bad Religion.
The rest of that album, while by no means bad, was missing something that Misery Index’s best work — Retaliate and the brilliant EP Dissent – had in spades. The band’s staying power has been attributed to its balance of death metal brutality and hardcore looseness, literally metalcore or deathcore before either of them became dirty words. Traitors was too surgically precise for its own good; a friend of mine described it as “being a little too death metal than I’m used to them being.” And while they’re no stranger to death metal — the band, after all, were an offshoot of Dying Fetus, one of the best death metal bands there are and ever will be and don‘t you fucking forget it — when they veer too far into one direction instead of straddling the middle ground of several, they lose some of their punch. Which is what makes their latest full length — the fucking great Heirs to Thievery – so wonderful. The band are back to groove-inflected deathgrind, sounding loose and spontaneous while simultaneously precise and well-rehearsed. Though an excellent new album is always occasion to declare it “the best thing the band has ever done,” Heirs to Thievery, with the passing of time, could very well be that.
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