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We Don't Wanna! | We're betting Against Me! just hated having this photo taken. Hence the lack of charm and smiles!

AGAINST ME!
w/ Japanther and Saint Alvia Cartel. Sep. 12 (7pm). Edmonton Event Centre (WEM).Tickets available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca).

“Awards are something my grandmother understands,” says Against Me! drummer Warren Oakes. “I can tell her all about the shows we’ve played and the bands we’ve toured with, and she’ll go, ‘I still think you should’ve gone to college.’ If I show her a magazine that says something nice about us, then it’s more like, ‘Maybe you guys aren’t so bad.’”

Oakes’ grandmother must have been ecstatic, then, when Spin declared the punk-rock outfit’s 2007 effort New Wave Album of the Year, soon after which Rolling Stone named Against Me! the best punk band working today.

A brash collection of fuck-the-man tunes with big guitars and even bigger hooks, New Wave is the synthesis of the band’s early, snarly attitude and their recent pop sensibilities. But even though the album is an accomplished piece of work from a band that continues to move forward with each release, the band insists the accolades they have received over the last few months came as a surprise to them.

“We weren’t sitting around thinking, ‘Oh, the year-end editions are coming out—they better give us lots of awards!’ or anything,” Oakes remarks. “We weren’t thinking much about the year-end awards at the time at all. We found out about the Spin thing after a show when the editor and a couple of guys that work at the magazine came up to us and told us that they had unanimously voted New Wave as their favourite album of the year. We thought, ‘The vote was unanimous? Yeah, right.’ At first we thought it was a joke, but they reassured us that they were totally serious.”

After the notion that someone actually wanted to give them an award sunk in, Against Me! were asked to do a photo shoot for the eventual two-page spread in Spin. Included in the article was a photo of the band hanging out in a forest, blending into the vibrant foliage, looking slightly nervous about the entire thing—a stark contrast to the unbridled confidence of their music. The photo was also dripping with irony: on “Piss and Vinegar,” from the album that led to the photograph, lead vocalist Tom Gabel makes fun of bands that take clichéd publicity photos. (“Publicity photos in magazines / None of it makes me feel anything.”) Looking back, Oakes says the band laughs about the whole experience.

“Most of the time you feel like a total asshole while you’re doing photo shoots,” he explains. “And most of the time you end up looking at the pictures afterward and think, ‘Wow, I look like a total asshole too.’ It’s something we’re still trying to perfect. We feel like sometimes we do a really good [shoot] and we’re like, ‘Alright, that was cool, let’s try to do that again,’ and sometimes you get a photo shoot were every single picture looks really cheap.

“You want to be in a band because you like to play music, not because you like to pose for photographs, but it’s something that people continue to insist on you doing,” Oakes concludes. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t do something cool or original at the same time.”