Written by Angeline.

I'm not at the beginning, I'm somewhere in the midst of it. Lines from the lyrics - Gloria's banners - come floating up. Words that I already love forever - words that inspire me, 'I am a nation without bureaurocratic ties, deny the allegation as it's written, FUCKING LIES' - words that tear ragged edges in me, 'like refugees, we're lost like refugees' - words that make me fucking angry, which would be Restless Heart Syndrome as a whole - words that make me cry -
Billie Joe's vocal on 21 Guns - jesus, this is such a place that I'm crying before I even know why, maybe not even for him or for me, although that's in there too - but I realize that he's singing in the voice beyond the voice, the song beyond the song - his voice could be the wind on the reeds or the call of a wolf, it is, - and this song, this 21st Century song, is coming from a timeless place. It's the voice of loneliness.

My mind flashes to when I first put the cd in my dust-covered, beat-up radio/cd thing, and the electric noise, the bubbling channels that I just listen to while I work sometimes, segued into the start of the record, continued till out of it emerged this voice, Billie Joe singing a dark little lullaby to himself - lilting a nightmare, waging the war and losing the fight - no, here is the victory, because here is the song -
and it's such an eerie moment, the candleflame (always lit, for the muse), flickering, the dust-covered cd player, it feels like deja vu, like this song is coming from past-present-future all at once - and it's clear to me that despite the constant riot, the sniper fire, and all the rest of it, he found the place - because, this song, all of these songs, are taking me there. I feel them like there's broken glass under my skin, I feel the suffocation, the anxiety, the weariness, the chaos, the needle-voices of mass hysteria. This is high art in a pair of Chuck Taylors, slinking its way under the radar like a renegade.

CHRISTIAN dreams backwards, he's a rememberer - he's got a head full of photographs and still frames, and the soundtrack to go with them - the singing, the laughter, he feels it like it was now and it feels better than now, now is all meaningless noise, brutality shoved in his face, no place for tenderness, for hope, gotta hang tough, defend yourself, and the best form of defense is attack. GLORIA dreams forward.
Gloria+Christian are inseparable - opposite points of a single compass. 21CB is their magnetic dance - they just sway apart from time to time, to take a long hard look at each other.

The day the lyrics came - that was huge, these words cyber-graffitied on a virtual wall, words of such beautiful, vulnerable humanity, words of desolation, words of fire - and though the words were really a music in themselves, the sound of how they looked, I wondered where the music would take them, if there was light in it for this pitch-black poetry, these unrelenting words with their backs to a virtual wall. When I got to hear them whole - sometimes, what lifts these songs out of the depths is not the words or the sense of the songs themselves, but the rise of the music, the expansion or the amplification that speaks the will to transcend a dark place. Before The Lobotomy begins and ends with the same words, intersected by Christian's story, but the second time round, the words are elevated on the sweep of music. It reminds me of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and the 'dreaming' of it reinforces that.

Gloria's light and Christian's inferno are the same flame, her idealism and his nihilism are expressions of a power that comes from the same place. Piss off an angel, and that angel becomes a winged fury.
No matter how many times he walks out the door and says it's finished, he'll come back, because life without her is no life at all. No matter how many times she thinks she's over him and she's so much better off on her own, it only takes the right moment for her to open the door and let him back in - or out.

GLORIA, WHERE ARE YOU? Screaming out all over the record like Stanley Kowalski for Stella - and incidentally, where are the stars on this record? The ones that promised so much on Waiting, the ones that shone out even over that dirty town on Are We the Waiting - and this is what we waited for, here it is, but you're not looking up at the stars, Christian/Gloria. You're looking inwards, or into the blurred-crystal-ball of the tv, fuckit if anyone's gonna see the light there.

This album is a Russian Doll. This album is a hall of mirrors. This album is doing something so fucking
cosmic that I wonder if this album even knows that it's doing it.

CHRISTIAN takes out his frustrations on Gloria - have you taken a look at yourself lately? You're a fucking train-wreck, a junkie, held together on a wish and a prayer - and you're the one with all the big ideas, the one that's gonna save us? Gloria made all of these promises - she holds out a vision that keeps him going thru all of the struggle with the darkness, he's fighting on and on and he's fucking tired, he wants to know why he should keep holding onto her hand instead of just taking the road to hell that's beckoning all the time and where he at least gets to have some kind of a good time.

And Christian's lesson's what he's been sold, not what he feels. 'We are normal and self-controlled' - which makes you not-normal, and that's a bad thing, Christian. You see lies everywhere, a world with a great big 'WRONG' written all over it, and it fucks you up so much that you wanna just nuke everything because you don't see any hope of ever getting thru to anyone. Everything screams at you in voices no-one else can hear, and all you get back is the homogenized sound of the vast majority just getting on with it, what's your fucking problem? The world is rocking under your feet all the time, tides and undercurrents, signs that flash out in the nite and the day, and all the time, the fear. The fear of losing hold on this see-sawing deck and being engulfed by a nameless, seething sea. So smile, Christian, and do whatever it takes to make that smile happen - take the medicine, have a drink, forget about wanting to know a goddamn thing, carve your life for our acceptance, and then you get to stay with us instead of being alone. Doesn't matter that really, you're still alone - you're a controlled implosion, no-one has to deal with your shit, you don't have to see the fall-out from your latest escapade written all over their faces, remember the words you said and you can't unsay them, they
found their mark and the mark remains. You get to live life on our terms, for as long as you can take it before you bust out of the chains and go on the rampage again, tearing all of it down - relationships, achievements, whatever kind of uneasy peace you had, subdued in no-man's land with the battle still blazing inside of you.

Christian wants to meet his match - someone from outside of inside who can knock him down, punish him, stop him, but no-one even comes close.

Fuckit but they both burn bright - Christian's bleak honesty is illumination, there's a total glory to his diabolic state because it's Gloria in the negative, her frustration translated, her seismic power unleashed from the nothing-and-everything that besets her.

21CB is simple and complex at the same time. It's not all about Christian+Gloria, and it is. There are many voices in here, and just one voice, one light, one mind.

East Jesus Nowhere - Christian annihilates with laser-precision, just because he can and it's fun. 'The sirens of decay will infiltrate the faith fanatic' - it's gonna happen anyway, Gloria can see it - and Christian doesn't give a fuck about these people who sign over their minds, stand-up-sit-down, still fucking peasants no matter what you say to them. Peacemaker's deeper, it's angry but it's sorrowful too, a despair in its humor. The power of love flipsides to destruction, mirroring Christian/Gloria.

Moments of vulnerable, soulful beauty and searching surface again and again.. It's this very vulnerability, caught up in a maelstrom of fear and despair, that makes 21CB almost unbearable at times, and even given all the kick-ass musicality, the sound-effects, the layers of production, it's Billie Joe's voice, singing from his soul, that touches deepest, most truly. His vocal saturates the record, spellbinds - when Mike's vocal comes in on Modern World, it's a jolt - it's like, 'there's somebody else in here?'

The most poignant song for me - and such a beautiful, beautiful song - is the first Viva la Gloria - those two little words, 'Hey Gloria', are the opening of such a secret, vulnerable place. It's an overheard prayer, a passionate love-letter, it's intimate and raw with emotion. A dream carried from lookout to sunset, a vision on the brink - and Christian's so alone, wherefore art thou, Gloria? She's right here in this song - she's everywhere on this record. Her voice is the courage to hope, the love that's undying, the light that can't even see itself. Gloria+Christian are inseparable.


Two chords, looping on the teaser - D and A. I don't have a fucking clue about chords, but I know sound - say it, and it comes out pretty much like DNA. Music as your being, and your reason for being. When the album comes, these chords are parentheses - inside of them is everything, heaven and hell, love and life.

The title track comes in, all guitars blazing, and I'm smiling all over my face at the sunburst of it, coming out of the dark.
'My generation was zero'? What the fuck do you have to do with your generation, it's not your genesis - you're a fucking miracle.

And this editorial is unlikely to be carried by Wal-Mart.