Spend any time at all in Pittsburgh and you'll immediately notice that the town is seriously hung up on the 1970s. It makes a lot of sense-- that was the last time the sports teams were winning championships. The 1970s were also the tail end of the steel-fueled economic boom, and therefore, the last time there would be a surplus of sweaty blue-collar jobs available. That same economic heyday contributed to Pittsburgh's population explosion, and thus, the city's architecture now suffers from the retro stylings of a bygone era. Yeah, it all makes sense, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing.

Worse, in one of the most mismatched marketing ploys in the history of civic identity branding, the town adopted a song by Sister Sledge as its informal theme song. 22 years later, they still play "We Are Family" at sporting events in this town. Now, I totally accept this to be an oppressive social milieu, as does most of Pittsburgh's suburban teens. They express their fabricated anger through loud, fast, obnoxious music, and what do they get in return? Flak from the cred police for their cushy, upper-middle class lifestyle!

The Pittsburgh mindset alone can be cruel and unusual punishment: the city's obsession with the "Stillers," the local cuisine (french fries on everything, including salads), and God help us, the Sister Sledge. Everywhere you turn, the Sister Sledge. The angry youths have every right to revolt in the Iron City. And local boys Anti-Flag are happy to oblige, while simultaneously keeping that 1970s Pittsburgh mentality alive.

After three prior albums, Anti-Flag's jump into the big time with California's Fat Wreck Chords would suggest that the guys have learned about four things in their eight years of being the keystone of the Pittsburgh scene. Not exactly what you'd call quick learners, so let's respect their long effort and enumerate here the things they've mastered:

#1) Pick-scrape as segue. "Got the intro? Got it? Good. We got the verse. Ummmm, uh-oh. What about the chorus? We'll just use the verse from that other song we decided not to develop. That'll do. But... oh no! Big problem, guys! How do we tie it all together?!" Anti-Flag use the device like musical airplane glue. Trite airplane glue.

#2) Stop-everything-but-the-chunky-bass bridge. Actually, "bridge" is a pretty generous word for this ubiquitous trick. Filler is more like it. Actually, it gets enough mileage on Underground Network to be another segue variant. Anti-Flag, masters of the cheap punk transition, your legacy has been secured for you.

#3) The clipped voice of leader Justin Sane (and you all laughed at "John Dark!") can evoke the best bands of both the British punk movement and the imitative SoCal punk scene of the early 80's without sounding half as good as either of them. The power of suggestion is a force to be reckoned with.

#4) If you preach to the choir, you're virtually guaranteed record sales by people who share the same ideological philosophies.

Thus, you are now privy to the secrets of songbuilding, as practiced by the premier punk revival band of the Rust Belt. Even though that's not so much a debunking as it is a statement of the obvious.

Also obvious are the parade of influences, though none so much as Social Distortion and the Adolescents. Anti-Flag are such true revivalists that, despite an impressively large and growing body of original work, their music is so similar to the forebears of the genre that they sound like an homage-bearing cover band. However, in 2001, Underground Network finds them farther away than ever from their earlier raw hardcore sound, when they were more akin to groups like MDC or the Exploited.

About halfway through, Underground Network begins sounding like the Clash in certain places. In one of the bounciest songs on the disc, "Watch the Right," Sane spits out a lyric here and there in competent Strummer fashion, and both the bridge in that song and the slower side of the next, "The Panama Deception," sound like something off Clash's 1977 eponymous debut. This promising upswing on the disc peaks with "Culture Revolution." It's an odd hybrid of a song. Less melodic than the rest, it feels more aggressive and fun with uncharacteristic nods toward noise-core and even metal. It still has that unfortunate and unsurprising bass break, though.

Whatever ruts Anti-Flag may have dug themselves into musically here, it's nothing compared to their lyrics. Since their inception, their social agenda has been in the league of the Dead Kennedys or Consolidated, two of the most blatantly political bands in punk and underground music history. The only problem with this approach is that it gets a bit smug and self-congratulatory after a while. After a few minutes of being preached at, you do what everyone does: tune out. With song titles ripped straight from the headlines of Z magazine, Anti-Flag are leftists first and musicians second (some might say third). Music isn't their message; it's merely the vehicle. And consequently, you wind up not paying much attention to either.

There was a time when I couldn't get enough of a band like Anti-Flag. They were my dream date to the radical left prom. Just the trappings of the CD would have been enough to get me wet: symbol of government aggression on the cover, liner notes with Chomsky quotes and custom commentary by populist historian Howard Zinn. Simply holding the insert, my fingers would have tingled with all that righteous rage. Twelve years later, I can't find a single disc by any of those soapbox bands in my collection. Anti-Flag gets saddled the curse of the loaded compliment: they're "good at what they do." Which connotes an underlying snobbery implying that "what they do" isn't really that good at all.

-John Dark