By Chris Baca ’11
THE ROUNDUP

The newest album from the punk rock band Rise Against released in early March.

Dubbed “Endgame” the album sold 85,000 albums in the first week alone.

However the important part about an album is not how much it sells, but how it sounds.

This album brings most of what made Rise Against popular to the table and polishes it.

There is, however, a noticeable effort with a few songs to attempt to soften their older, harder sound.

This is likely to appeal to a wider range of people.

Fear not, for “Endgame” is not a sellout album by any means, but the appeal to a wider audience is surely there.

Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how the listener takes it, this newest addition to their collection of albums sounds much like their previous albums, especially “Appeal to Reason”.

This can be taken one of two ways.

It can either be good news for one who already enjoys their previous work or bad news for a listener that wanted this band to branch out more or get back to their roots.

Specifically, the song “Architects” sounds a lot like “Life Less Frightening,” especially the intro.

The subject matter of this album is also similar to that of most of their older albums.

As always there are political and counter culture references behind Rise Against’s songs but this is nothing new and should probably be expected.

The more political lyrics can be seen in the songs “Architects” and “Broken Mirrors.”

“Architects” talks about the apathy or indifference that many people now take towards the world.

“Do you still believe in all the things that you stood by before? Are you out there on the front lines, or at home keeping score?”

These are an example of the lyrics that have political undertones in the first song on the album, “Architects”

Overall the sound that made the band popular is there and any fan of both the newer Rise Against songs and the older ones will feel right at home listening to this album.