20th anniversary review: Living End – “Roll On”

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.

Reprise – November 27, 2000

Twenty years ago, The Living End showed us the different things you can do with rockabilly on this album that doesn’t get enough attention outside of its home country of Australia

It’s hard to find an album that’s just a banger from start to finish.  An album that, not only has no bad tracks, but on which every song is actively good, and every twist and turn listening to the album is an absolute delight to experience.  While not the most famous punk album ever made (outside of the band’s home country of Australia where it went double platinum), The Living End’s Roll On is definitely one of these albums for me.  The album is 14 tracks of pure, psychobilly-infused pop-punk greatness.  

While their first, self-titled album was excellent, too, Roll On expanded on the band’s obvious Stray Cats influence on their debut and brought in some other sounds, not to replace the psychobilly, but to combine with it, creating a diverse and dynamic album that’s still rooted firmly in punk and rockabilly. This album was not so much utilizing rockabilly outright as much as it was breaking open rockabilly to see how it works, creating tunes with rockabilly roots without being straight-up rockabilly. Bassist Scott Owen can more commonly be seen playing an upright double bass than a normal bass guitar, even today when their music has strayed away from rockabilly, and the double bass has always added authenticity to the band’s rockabilly sound.

The only track that served as a blemish on this masterpiece is a track that only appeared on the US release of the album: the 15^th track, a live version of “Prisoner of Society,” the lead single off their self-titled debut and the song that had, at that point (and probably still to this day), gotten more radio airplay in the US than anything else the band had put out.  It was obvious that the inclusion of this track was the choice of their American label, Reprise records, who showed so little faith in an album of new material from this still fledgling Australian band in the American marketplace that they felt the need to put the band’s most successful song off of a previous album and slap it on the band’s sophomore release along with a sticker on the front of the album assuring you that “Prisoner of Society” appears on this record.  “Prisoner of Society” was a good song (although far from the strongest track off their self-titled album), and it wasn’t a bad live version of the song, but the lack of confidence it showed from the label is all I can think of whenever that last track comes up while I’m playing this album.  But, this review is being written for the 20^thanniversary of the original, Australian release of the record, not the versions released by Reprise internationally four months later, so let’s talk about the perfection that is the original, Australian release of Roll On.

The album kicks off with the Who-inspired track and the album’s title track, which tells the story of a labor dispute between Melbourne’s dock workers and their bosses. You might know this song from its use in American Express commercials in the early 2000’s, which the band swore they didn’t authorize. Have you ever heard rockabilly mixed with metal? Because that’s essentially what you get in the band’s anti-drinking song, “Carry Me Home.” Some of those metal riffs carry over to the next track, “Don’t Shut the Gate” which also throws in some surf for good measure.

Side B of the record kicks off with “Blood on Your Hands,” an epic song that’s constantly changing tempos and which predicted the ideological gap between Millenials and Boomers before the Millenials even really became adults (and yes, Chris Cheney is Gen X, but he was writing for Millenials at the time). The vengeful break-up song “Silent Victory” has a very strong and very obvious AC/DC influence to it. The last track (on the non-US version) is one I didn’t like at first but has grown on me over the 20 years since this album’s release. “Uncle Harry” is no rockabilly song and, in fact, borders on oi music as the song tells the story of a formerly alcoholic uncle who’s now infirm and pissing in the bath.

Shortly after the release of this album, frontman Chris Cheney was in a serious car accident that he was lucky to survive, and he said it gave him a new perspective about where he wanted the band to go. Around the same time, drummer Travis Dempsey quit the band to be replaced with Andy Strachan. The next few albums did away with a lot of the experimentation from Roll On and reverted to a more basic pop-punk-rockabilly formula. It wouldn’t be until 2008’s White Noise that the band started experimenting with their sound again (to lesser results), and it wouldn’t be until 2016’s Shift that the band produced an album that was as good as Roll On. But for all the times they fell short, Roll On stands as one triumphant moment where they went above and beyond and really exceeded expectations.