Andrew Jackson Jihad- People That Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World

Andrew Jackson Jihad- People That Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World

Genre:Folk/Punk

Released: September 2007

What set they rep? Phoenix, Arizona

WEBSITE

Songs:

1.  Rejoice

2.  Brave as a Noun

3.  Survival

4.  Bad Bad Things

5.  No More Tears

6.  Bells & Whistles

7.  Randy’s House

8.  A Song Dedicated to the Memory of Stormy the Rabbit

9.  People II: The Reckoning

10.  Personal Space Invader

11.  People

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(download on mediafire)

Today, We have a special guest voice… One that just happens to reside in another shell…

It’s what i’m thinking. It’s what you’re thinking. It’s what they’re thinking. The difference between us and Andrew Jackson Jihad is that this band is brave enough to sing about it. You know, the manic emotional war in your head between utter hatred and irrevocable love for the people who surround us—our teachers, our parents, the apathetic Wal-Mart worker, that bum on the corner you see sleeping on the concrete while you chain smoke—whomever.

So it’s very fitting that AJJ has seamlessly combined the rebellious side of punk with the affectionate, “let’s-all-get-stoned-and-cuddle” mood that acoustic folk music seems to provoke within us music enthusiasts. Coupled with Sean Bonnette’s high-pitched, urgent-sounding voice, the overall tone of the album is clear: fuck the pettiness, listen, and be happy. It’s the kind of music that invokes within you the urge to do a circular, overenthusiastic jig despite how mentally incapacitated you might appear. Though it ends leaving you in a bewildered daze, one couldn’t possibly demand this album to be any longer—those 25 minutes are so jam-packed with prophetic wisdom, i swear i can picture Socrates in the corner of a show, awkwardly swaying along in his toga to the beat of the upright bass, nodding his head in approval.

Bonnette gives us a Utopian vision of a perfect world, one with “no more bad times, no more bummers, no more SUV’s and no more Hummers.” You know anyone hatin’ on Hummers is legit. Instead, AJJ wants only the best for us—“happy times and half-assed rhymes…most of all no more tears.” They order, “Be the best fucking human that you can be!” and calls us out on our lowest and most depraved moments—“How can you put that straw up your nose when you know how coke is manufactured?...It’s made by babies who’ve been captured.” Maybe it’s because, as he sings, We’ve all got “a Nazi and a rapist living in our tiny hearts.” Yeah. i said it. We are all evil and self-serving.

It’s an album that i, for over half a year, have continuously returned to. I felt as though Bonnette had snuck from the wires of my headphones right into my soul. “Shit,” i said aloud as i thought about the schoolwork i should have been doing while writing this review. “i’ve got essays, i’ve got finals due/i have got lots and lots of problems,” Sean sang despairingly, mimicking my tone.

He continued reading my mind, singing “Your bi-polar illness, it comes and it goes/your parasympathetic nervous system reacts and you’re in fight-or-flight mode.” And yes, AJJ throws around smart people words like “parasympathetic” a lot. These dudes are the goddamn philosophers of our lost and lonely generation.

So go listen. And give your mom a hug, because even though she maybe gave you a few complexes throughout childhood and still pisses you off a lot, “people are the greatest thing to happen.”

-Deepster McPBRlover