Out last week on Tent City Records, Freedom of Speech Means Talk Is Cheap is the first we've heard from Destroy Everything in several years. From the clever album art with its sardonic take on American iconography, Freedom makes no bones about the anarchist ideals (at its most conservative far left: far, far left) which are committed to the tracks. While spazzing out on songs including the almost melodic ("On a punk album?" you say) "Just One More Thing" and the scathing "True Believer" I was nodding my head to the messages which tended to align with many of my own philosophies.

Critics of punk will roll their eyes and expect toothless, back-patched panhandlers wrote these songs. To the contrary, the vocabulary on this album is top-notch, lyrically arranged like a storage unit full of bric-a-brac, where so many gems are lovingly crammed into such a small space it's near impossible to pull your favorite and leave the rest to collect dust.

Band members embrace anonymity with names such as Cheddar Nines (lead vox) and Stiff Mittens (bass, guitar, principal songwriter), rising from the ashes of defunct '80s Chicago punk bands to form Destroy Everything, raining down anticapitalist, anticorporate rhetoric with a vengeance. Where manufacturing outsourcing and the prison-industrial complex meet, Destroy Everything is there to spew venom at the opiated masses.

Tags: Album Reviews, Chicago, Destroy Everything, New Releases, Punk Rock