20th anniversary review: Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards – “s/t”

This review is part of a series looking back at significant albums on their anniversaries. Through the benefit of hindsight we will be viewing the album not just as it was released, but how it stands the test of time, as well as its place in the band’s discography and the genre in general.

20 Mar 2001 – Hellcat Records

Frederiksen stands out on his own

I think I have a tendency to underestimate Lars Frederiksen. I tend to think of him as merely the lesser of the two songwriters in Rancid, which is a bit of an unfair characterization of him that glosses over the countless great songs he’s written for the band. I think I also unfairly forget about his semi-solo project, Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards, where he was really given a chance to shine on his own. Well, I say “on his own,” but his other half from Rancid, Tim Armstrong, produced both Bastards albums and has a co-writing credit on every Bastards song that wasn’t a cover, but while Armstrong was delegated to helping out behind the scenes, Frederiksen proved that he can handle a spotlight pointed directly at him. Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards’ first, self-titled album is one of the best hardcore albums I’ve ever heard, and remains, to this day, a widely overlooked classic.

Despite the fact that everything about this album’s cover art screams “traditional hardcore album,” right down to the choice of font, Frederiksen put together some amazingly infectious pop hooks. After a quick introduction by a band member named Gordy Carbone—known within the band as “The Unknown Bastard,” a man whose job was generally just to run around on stage with a leather mask on and sing backup vocals—the album launches into the morbidly infectious “Dead American.” Its kind of hard to pinpoint which conflict Frederiksen is referring to that’s producing these dead Americans, as this whole album came out prior to 9/11, but aren’t there always choices made by the American government that wind up with dead Americans. In fact, the song has vague echoes of the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19.

Frederiksen explains in the liner notes that this album was born out of telling Armstrong all the stories about his old gang, The Skunx (Skinheads, Punx, and Drunx). So, even though the album has its fair share of political songs, a lot of it is very personal as well. Even the cover of Billy Bragg’s “To Have and To Have Not” adds a short extra verse to personalize it a bit.

Again, these hardcore songs have a tendency to be catchy as hell, especially the political ones like “Army of Zombies,” “Wine and Roses,” and “10 Plagues of Egypt.” The only real duds on the album come in the back-to-back penultimate tracks, “Subterranean” and “Skunx.” After a litany of short stories of people he knew growing up, “Subterranean” is dedicated to the Skunx. This is immediately followed by a song…called “Skunx.” The two songs become thematically(not to mention musically) repetitive. But the album redeems itself with the final track, “Vietnam,” which combines crime drama with social commentary about how America treats its veterans.

So 20 years later, with the exception of a few tracks, Lars Frederiksen demonstrates what he’s capable of when he’s the star of the show. Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards would return with a second album called Viking three years later, that still didn’t measure up to the self-titled album but was excellent nonetheless. Still, nothing demonstrates Frederiksen’s ability like the first Bastards album.