History is unforgiving.

Occasionally, bands find themselves releasing politicized, socially aware records that time will reveal to be almost laughably sincere (consider a well intentioned but paralysed and stiff album like Stark Raving Mad’s Amerika). But then, every once in a while, a work comes along like For Blood And Empire – Anti-Flag’s magnum opus, and an album with a staying power that makes it feel as vital today as when it was first released in 2006.

After all, according to the bassist Chris Barker (AKA Chris No. 2), the record is almost prophetic in terms of its analysis of the media and its intersection with American politics – particularly given the post-Trump era we now inhabit.

“We’ve been rehearsing today,” Barker begins. “And I think that one of the things I noticed today is just that so much of [For Blood And Empire] is about the failure of the media to be the watchdog of the powerful. And then ten years later you look at Donald Trump, who is 100 per cent a byproduct of that same fact. We haven’t held politicians accountable, and journalists don’t act as journalists – they act as ratings warriors who are just looking for stories that are going to be exciting versus being the truth.”

Indeed, though President-elect Trump is a genuine threat, Barker reckons the real problem lies with a range of troubling forces that have been present for years. “There is a lot of really apropos social commentary on Blood And Empire that really fits on what’s happening in the world [today], whether it be global terrorism or Monsanto and the company’s recent merger,” he says. “Just the global conglomerate takeover of what we eat, and what we are able to buy and what we are able to ingest on a daily basis.”

Part of Barker’s issue lies in the deliberate obfuscation of the truth, a problem not unfamiliar to Australians. After all, the media in this country provides wall-to-wall coverage for people like Pauline Hanson, and though Andrew Bolt frequently squeals about the restrictions of his freedom, he has a platform few others have been blessed with.

“We’re giving a voice and allowing discussions with people that we really shouldn’t,” agrees Barker. “We should really cut them off before they begin. I think as a journalist, your job is to say, ‘Science is real, black lives matter.’ We’re allowing people a voice to say the opposite of the truth, and it’s just wrong. Facts are facts. We’ve given space for people to allow their arguments to be spoken as though they’re valid, and some of them aren’t.”

It’s not like Barker and his bandmates haven’t offered up such a bold analysis of the press cycle before – ‘The Press Corpse’, one of the most blistering tunes on For Blood And Empire, takes journalists and editors to task. But is Barker proud of his prescience? “I think in a lot of ways, a lot of the songs make more sense now than they did in 2006,” he says. “But you never want to look at it as, ‘Oh, we were right.’ But I found myself today going, ‘This was the stuff we were talking about. This is what we were warning ourselves of falling into, and that’s where we are.’”

That said, For Blood And Empire is far from a depressing record. It rattles and rages with its own sense of hope, and every line about oppression is countered by one about resistance. Anti-Flag will celebrate the album’s tenth birthday by playing it in full on their Australian tour in December, and Barker says the counter-aggression that drives the songs was fostered by the atmosphere of support the band felt at the time.

“Back then, when we were writing Blood And Empire, it seemed like everywhere you looked someone was opposing George W. Bush and Tony Blair and their war of aggression in the Middle East. I mean, that really made us feel like we weren’t alone. That’s where those songs came from.

“I will say that of the records we’ve brought into the touring world, probably the two that we have played the most of have been For Blood And Empire and American Spring. I think it’s really funny – we have three records between For Blood And Empire and American Spring, and I think one of the reasons why we play so many songs from [those two] records is because those are the records where we are at our most hopeful.

“Those three in the middle were the songs where we were at our bleakest, because we had lost the war in Iraq, and Barack Obama became President and that seemed very exciting, but we took a rest. People felt, ‘Oh, we’ve won,’ so they took a break … For us, it put us in this really strange place, where we wanted to talk about wealth inequality, we wanted to talk about police murder, we wanted to talk about drone strikes, and all of these things that were happening under Obama’s watch, but we felt really alone on all of those things, and so they’re a bit darker.”

As a result, though the American election and ensuing Trump victory has depressed Barker as much as it has depressed much of the world, he has gained a strange sense of purpose from all the bile that has brewed up. “To be honest, we all do much better with an enemy. So, as frustrating as it is to be in that predicament where we have an enemy, it means we’re more focused, and it allows us to channel our creativity and energy into challenging something to be better.”

Anti-Flag, andScott Reynolds, play the Factory Theatre on Thursday December 8.

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