https://www.popmatters.com/178403-against-me-transgender-dysphoria-blues-2495693578.html
This review does nothing to hide its love for the album. It discusses the use of bodily imagery, such as fingers or hearts or shoulders, to display tension in songs like “Paralytic States.” Almost constantly, the body talk is in the third person, creating emotional distance between Grace and the songs that are reflective of her personal experiences. It talks about how this tactic makes emotional moments more effective and “emphasizes the distance between body and identity,” and not only in terms of gender identity. I had never quite noticed all of that imagery as something that could be analyzed like that. I had been looking at each song individually rather than the record as a whole. The song “Black Me Out” was, according to this review, less about shapeless rage or a kiss goodbye to the band’s record label, and more about “denying a much larger set of false controls” and parts of a life that had “lived under a series of thumbs.” The third to last line of the song, and of the entire album, is “full body high.” The review points out how this is one of the few instances of a positive connections with the body. That line had always seemed like the most hopeful part of any song in any album. Grace’s voice has “visceral” emotion in it, a word that gets used a lot in these reviews and that I could not agree with more, contrary to the review from TheNeedleDrop, calling it lacking in the very thing Pop Matters praises it most for.
Media Project 