Revolution?" asks Swindelli, Manbreak's charismatic leader, in his distinctive Liverpudlian accent. "Count me in." But while some artists tackle the sociopolitical realities of the end of the millennium with more anger than enlightenment, more noise than poetry, Manbreak questions the status quo with melody and intelligence - even optimism. Manbreak rails against a system that patronizes, poisons and pisses on us all. "I can't write love songs without sounding pathetic," Swindelli concedes. "I don't know how much love I have in me. I write about what is tangible and real to me. Someone once said only art, love and politics matter. Well, I'll take two of those." On Come and See, Manbreak's debut album, the band throws down the gauntlet of political rock 'n' roll. And if you can't deal with it, well, you can still dance to it. And if you don't read philosophy, economics, history and the journal Socialist Worker, as Swindelli does, you can still sing along. The record - produced by Stephen Hague (Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, Pere Ubu) - shares its title with a 1985 film by Soviet director Elem Klimov that depicts a young man roaming the Russian countryside during World War II after Russia has been invaded by Germany. Its rendering of war and atrocities on the Eastern Front is grim, vivid and unnerving. Manbreak's album, on the other hand, mixes rock (the storming "Ready or Not"), pop, hip-hop and even the dance undertow of Manchester ("Kop Karma"). Add the piano ballad "God's Never Heard of You" and the complete-with-string-quartet lullaby "Is Everyone Still Asleep" and Manbreak reveal themselves to be a truly diverse musical endeavor. Swindelli confirms: "We don't say, 'This is our sound, and that's it.' We push the boundaries." England's New Musical Express called the band's specialty "a blistering mutant ramming together of rap and rock which, for once, is cringe-free" (January 18, 1997). What separates Manbreak from the pretenders, he points out, "is that most artists who delve into politics tend to be prosaic and didactic. There isn't much poetry in their contribution, and the music is not on a par with the words. I want to be able to listen to our songs for pleasure in 10 years, or else," he adds with a laugh, "be seriously agitated. But I like Frank Sinatra and Burt Bacharach and that melodic tradition. If I wrote a pop song as good as one of Bacharach's, I would not sleep less easy because it was not a political polemic. But the double challenge for Manbreak is to be good as well as relevant." Formed in May 1994, the band took its name from a then-secret, now-scandalous military program of the 1950s and '60s in which the British government exposed some of its own soldiers to low-level chemical weapons and then let them loose on an assault course to see how they would perform in the field. Some of the experiment's human guinea pigs died as a result of the experience. Sneers Swindelli, "So much for King and Country." Hailing from Liverpool are singer-songwriter Swindelli, lead guitarist Snaykee, rhythm guitarist Mr. Blonde and bassist Roy Van Der Kerkoff, with drummer Stu Boy Stu emigrating from Yorkshire. Snaykee performed and recorded with Swindelli's previous group, the 25th of May, which toured Europe opening for the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy and released the 1992 album Lenin and McCarthy. Manbreak has played throughout the U.K., including three small tours. Some months after Almo Sounds A&R executive Howard Thompson saw the band at a London club in November 1995, they were signed to the label. Swindelli acknowledges it wasn't easy finding a producer willing to take on such a staunchly socially conscious band: "As soon as producers read the lyrics, they shied away. When Stephen Hague asked on, we were surprised. The first thing I said to him was, 'The bands your name is synonymous with are not like us.' But that's precisely why he wanted to do it." (Come and See, released June 3, 1997, was recorded at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Bath, England, in July, October and November 1996. A non-album version of the Come and See track "News of the World" was issued that November as a 7-inch by the British label One Little Indian, known for its Björk releases; a follow-up CD single, "Wasted," appeared on One Little Indian in April 1997.) According to Swindelli, "It's become unfashionable to challenge orthodoxies through music. A lot of artists won't stick their heads over the precipice. So everyone becomes nihilistic: 'There's nothing we can do.' But you can't just say, 'Fuck everything!' At the end of the day, that's not terribly constructive. Calling something 'PC' turns it into a caricature. But if challenging racism and sexism is politically correct, so be it." For the record, the extremely well-read Swindelli is no sloganeering dilettante. He insists, "Without the information, all you have is an emotional response." Swindelli was raised in a working-class family; his father was a manual laborer. As a boy, he liked football and fighting. "Fortunately," he confides, "I'm the type of person who can talk his way out of a hangman's noose." He left school at 16 with the realization that "opportunities for someone from the working class are limited." Except in music. Influenced by punk and rap, he found both suited the music in his gut and the musings in his head. He was also inspired by a local band that had emerged decades earlier: "Despite their lowly background, the Beatles achieved - not by default but through talent, craft and hard-fought effort." Until he, too, could achieve, Swindelli survived on the dole. "That's what it's there for," he says, "for scrounging apprentice pop stars." He continues, more seriously and with typically blunt honesty, "I'm in this to be successful and not go back on the dole. I don't pretend to be an artiste who says he doesn't give a fuck. That's bullshit. I deserve a crack at the whip, too." Liverpool, meanwhile, has changed enormously since the Fab Four. Once an industrial powerhouse, it long ago fell on hard times. As in many Northern English cities, which share a historical antagonism with the more bourgeois South, austerity and class consciousness go hand in hand. Yet the nightlife thrives. Just as in the '60s, it seems the only avenues for escape are football and music. Swindelli nonetheless manages to maintain some optimism: "Things are bad, but we don't have Salvadorean death squads at our door either. We still want better, though, don't we? Music can't change the world, but if we can add to the argument then at least we're doing something." Insisting there's a place for politics in pop," he asserts: "No one criticizes Picasso for 'Guernica' because it comments on war. Why should pop music be treated any differently?" Still, Swindelli understands the limitations of music as well as its potential. "If we really had the bollocks, we'd be fighting on the side of the rebels in East Timor [where the Indonesian government has long been brutally suppressing an independence movement]. That's a genuine issue, unlike pop music. But what's a poor boy to do?" Apparently, the best he can. What's amazed Swindelli is that despite the band's high-minded political bent, Manbreak's audiences are usually filled with screaming teenagers, many of them young women. "You know," he ventures, "it must be the trousers."