saw SLC Punk the other night for the first time. It chronicles the life of a fervently ideological Salt Lake City punk rocker, and the eventual happy ending of his descent into the cultural mediocrity of middle class liberalism. Which is to say, I don’t really “get” it. Are punks supposed to notice the folly of their stigmatic ideologies? Does anarchy just not work? Is the mall punk interpretation of anarchy grossly misstated and abused? That one’s a yes, but still, I somehow don’t think it’s the point, and I’m still confused.

I was similarly confounded when I saw Against Me! close out their North American tour last month in truly anti-climactic fashion, with me waiting to hear my time-tested favorite “Baby, I’m an Anarchist,” and them inviting every fucker in the house up on stage with them to belt out the lyrics to every song right into the mic. My friends and I were certain an encore was coming to close off the night—that the abrupt stop to the music was a casualty of the raucous bleeding from the mosh pit onto the stage. But it wasn’t.

Against Me! just don’t do encores. It’s too rock star and pretentious for them. Fair enough, I just would have wanted to hear a few more tunes. Leaving that alone, that unceremonious ending idea is one the band plays with consistently in Searching for a Former Clarity. The album starts off with “Miami” and its stuttering strums transposing into a broken chord, before launching into a progression of psychedelic blues bends, screaming choruses, and fleeting horns.

I could talk about each of the greatest moments on the album and try to convince you to check it out by describing it, but I’d rather convince you to worship the stuff that makes them worth paying attention to rather than the next piece of hype. It’s their honesty, their constant self-criticism, and their dedication to broadcasting a message for the next course of direct action. In “How Low” it’s the need to straighten out your own issues of excess; in “Violence” it’s the need to restrain the forces that make us project those same insecurities that push us to excess onto other people. “Don’t Lose Touch” is a plea to stay true to the fundamental basics of what makes us do things in the first place.

Make no mistake, Searching is Against Me! selling out, as witnessed on “Mediocrity Gets You Pears,” but that’s what makes it sound so good. Where SLC Punk was an underground hit for big budget names, all it created in effect was a bullshit idealism for angst ridden teenagers to cite as justification for being shit disturbers. Against Me! couldn’t claim immunity against that charge a year ago, but as of now, they display a level of maturity that agrees with their anti-establishment roots and at the same time understands the comfort in being able to take the safety of a middle road. The difference is they do it without forgetting what it is that makes it such a compelling problem.

Really, Against Me! is all about one thing. It’s the one thing that pushes us all to self-destruction. It’s about the plague of pluralistic ignorance.

It doesn’t matter that “Unprotected Sex with Multiple Partners” sounds gawky coming into the final stretch, or that the saddest part of “Violence” is that the drums get lost in the mix once the distorted guitars come in; that said song and “How Low” directly answer each others’ rhetorical queries, or that the beginning of “Justin” sounds like that Chris Isaac song before inadvertently tipping to the band’s communal love of The Constantines.

Sure, these are the issues that critics are generally supposed to deal with: the idiosyncrasies of musicianship that make great albums even greater by virtue of their subtle flaws alone. But that’s not what any of us claim to be in it for—not counting those of us who really need some cred. We just want to talk about music, whether we love it or hate it.

I was going to end the review by saying they’re not quite Fugazi, but that despite all of the personal anecdotes, this is not fucking emo. Then the plan was to allude to some prophetic realization of “How Low” and ask a rhetorical question about the future.

Instead, the band just signed to Sire, a Warner subsidiary, and their last indie album closes out on the title track with the line “Let all be forgiven.” Good enough.