20th anniversary review: The Transplants – “The Transplants”

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.

Hellcat Records – 22 OCT 2002

The Transplants still holds up as a classic mix of punk and hip-hop 20 years later.

There aren’t enough rap-punk bands in the world. Basically if you want punk and rap combined you more or less have two choices: Zebrahead and The Transplants. Zebrahead has the better rapper of the two bands, but The Transplants are the ones with better street cred. The Transplants are a three-man supergroup made up of Tim Armstrong of Rancid and Operation Ivy, Travis Barker of Blink-182 (and like 2 million other band)s, and Rancid’s roadie Skinhead Rob Aston. Is Aston a great rapper? No. I still have a hard time not snickering when Aston says lines like “No one lives forever; in fact, we all die” in “Diamonds and Guns” or when he hamfistedly tries to paraphrase Emiliano Zapata on “One Seventeen.” But I feel like Aston, as ineloquent as he is, sometimes talks about experiences that white, suburban punks really need to hear about. Besides, I’ll take any chance I get to hear Armstrong stop screaming and start singing with his mouth-full-of-marbles drawl.

The Transplants’ debut self-titled album is easily the band’s best record, although all of their albums have been a lot of fun. As the story goes, Tim Armstrong supposedly created the beats for this album in Pro-Tools, but upon hearing them Travis Barker insisted he could play Armstrong’s programmed beats by hand. Barker, thus, proves himself to be a one-man human drum machine as he pounds away at the complex, high-speed beats of a punk-rap fusion project. The bass work on the album is pretty impressive considering there were multiple musicians stepping in to fill this role, including Dave Carlock and Rancid’s Matt Freeman, but a lot of the bass is actually done by Armstrong himself. In spite of Armstrong doing a lot of things himself on this album, it also features a slew of amazing guest stars including AFI’s Davey Havok and Armstrong’s then-wife and Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle.

The album kicks the door down on the opening track, “Romper Stomper,” which is just an onslaught of furious guitars backed by Barker’s amazing drums. And who couldn’t love the catchy and debaucherous “Tall Cans in the Air” complete with Armstrong’s best self-deprecating line: “I don’t sing, no never, I only shout”? This is the song where it becomes apparent that, while Aston is supposed to be the band’s “rapper” and Armstrong the “singer,” Armstrong can rap pretty well himself.

Despite its bizarre use in Garnier shampoo commercials in the early 2000s and in spite of the aforementioned laughable line from Aston, “Diamonds and Guns” is an absolutely amazing song. It manages to prove that a punk song can be catchy and badass at the same time. Aston’s duet with Davey Havok on “Quick Death” blurs the line between rapping and screaming in a furious revenge track.

“One Seventeen” is probably the fastest song on the album and yet still manages to balance that with strong hip-hop beats and vocals, proving that you can pretty much rap over anything. The bizarre Wu-Tang parody “D.R.E.A.M.” (which, in this case, stands for “Drugs Rule Everything Around Me”) really shouldn’t work but somehow does, in part thanks to the guest vocals of rapper Danny Diablo. However, I never quite understood why Aston sat out the last track, “Down in Oakland,” as Armstrong could easily have saved such a song for either Rancid or his solo project. What’s the point in making a song a Transplants song if you’re not going to use all of The Transplants? That being said, it’s an excellent song, it just feels out of place without Aston.

The Transplants is definitely flawed, but also, in its own gangsta punk kind of way, it’s absolutely beautiful. While bringing together members of Rancid and Blink-182 may seem to be an unlikely combination, the project manages to become the best side-project to come out of either band. And that’s saying something comparing it to bands like Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards and +44. The band are technically still active, although their last release, the covers EP Take Cover, was a mixed bag, especially their ill-advised cover of “Nothing But a Heartache.” But hopefully The Transplants will grace us with more music sometime soon.