Rob's Best: #4: Propagandhi - Potemkin City Limits

Released: October 18, 2005.

Propagandhi are one of the best bands on the planet, period.  They are a thrash-influenced punk band from Winnipeg, Manitoba.  Their lyrics are some of the most insightful and witty and challenging that that I've ever heard.  From the opener "A Speculative Fiction" which plays with the idea of open conflict breaking out between the United States and Canada, to "Cut Into The Earth" and it's examination of the hypocrisy of the descendants of immigrants, now living comfortably, as they decry the newly immigrated in their struggles to survive in North America, this album is full of cutting observation performed overtop technically impressive musicianship.  My favorite song, "Iteration", illustrates a courtroom scene in which all the varied visages of war profiteering are put on trail for crimes against humanity:

But how can one man ever repay a debt so appalling?
Can’t gouge 10,000 eyes
from a single head so I
think we should observe
a sentence that will serve
to satisfy both a sense of function and poetry:
so you will spend the rest
of your days drenched in sweat,
with your face drawn in a rictus of terror as you remove
another buried land mine fuse.

Meanwhile,
100 yards back
behind the sandbags,
a legless foreman
pulls the trigger on
a red megaphone.
Squelching feedback.
Drunken laughter.
Broken English.
His dead daughter’s picture.

Time and tide,
no one can anticipate the inevitable waves of change.