Pitchfork

Hey, Steve, when does the revolution start? The title of Steve Earle's 12th album, silly as it is, could be seen as a nudge against Earle's previous release, the controversy magnet Jerusalem. His highest-profile record in ages, if not his highest-selling, it contained the O'Reilly-baiting "John Walker's Blues", an explication of the American Taliban's motives that was vilified for having the audacity to humanize the enemy, which Fox pundits and Nashville DJs saw as matter-of-factly treasonous.

There's little on The Revolution Starts... Now that's likely to ruffle as many feathers as that song-- i.e., nothing quite so revolutionary-- although two early tracks try their damnedest. "Rich Man's War" draws similarities between an American soldier named Jimmy and an Iraqi insurgent named Ali, both of whom Earle describes as "just another poor boy off to fight a rich man's war." Anyone with an American flag license plate holder is going to find parallels like these at least disagreeable and at most offensive (although Earle may have a better chance of reaching swing listeners than many dissenting acts). Like "John Walker's Blues"," the song works hard to make both Jimmy and Ali seem sympathetic, and while the effort is laudable, the result is less than compelling.

Faring far worse, both politically and artistically, is "Warrior", a spoken-word song full of purple-prose lyrics along the lines of, "Your faithful retainer stands resolute/ To serve his liege lord without recompense/ Perchance to fall and perish namelessly." Rather than being merely unrevolutionary, it sounds more like an embarrassment. It doesn't help that the song is sandwiched by a forgettable trucker anthem ("Home to Houston") and a story-song ("The Gringo's Tale") that takes forever to set up and then falls apart with a disappointing anticlimax that sounds as calculated as a stump speech.

Ironic considering its title, The Revolution Starts... Now is halfway over before it picks up with the one-two punch of "Condi Condi" and "F the CC". The latter rocks the album's catchiest shout-out and is stage-ready for an audience pumping fists and singing along with, "Fuck the FCC/ Fuck the CIA/ Fuck the FBI/ Living in the motherfuckin' USA." As it finally breaks down into a Ramones-style spellalong, the song becomes the most righteously defiant track on the entire album.

Earle sings "Condi Condi", a tongue-in-cheek-and-in-other-places ode to our current national security adviser, with Daily Show-esque straight-faced aplomb, and it should have fans lowering their pumping fists to cover their mouths as they chuckle over lines like, "Skank for me, Condi." While neither is as outright hilarious as Eric Idle's "FCC Song", both songs are a much-needed laugh amid all this election-year seriousness, and like a tent pole, they prop up an otherwise sagging album.

"Comin' Around", a duet with Emmylou Harris, and "I Thought You Should Know" rein in the politics in favor of more personal matters. While the songs may seem out of place on an album bearing this title, Earle lets them remind his listeners-- as if they need reminding-- that life continues during wartime, more or less the same as before. Heartache and happiness, dread and disappointment aren't exclusive to political anxiety, and these songs make the album sound less like a manifesto than a document of a year spent watching the dead-heat elections and going about your business.

Good as some of these songs are-- and the entire album is better than Nicholson Baker's similarly anti-war novel Checkpoint-- they're not quite enough to foment a revolution, and Earle closes the album with a lengthy reprise of the title track, which creates a bookend effect without actually building to anything specific. He's always been a deeply political musician, a radical in a genre whose stock-in-trade these days seems to be tradition. His ideology informs just about all of his albums to some degree, but politics as an overt subject may not be his forte, as The Revolution attests.