30th Anniversary review: Bad Religion – “Against the Grain”

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 also how it stands the test of time, as well as its place in the band’s discography and the genre in general.

Epitaph – November 23, 1990

Celebrating one of Bad Religion’s many great albums that can get lost in a sea of masterpieces.

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of Bad Religion’s fifth album, Against the Grain. It’s an album I think gets somewhat forgotten about with its positioning about halfway between what are arguably the band’s two best albums, Suffer and Stranger Than Fiction. At the time Bad Religion was riding high following the success of their two post reunion albums, Suffer and No Control, both of which were excellent. Nobody expected the band to do anything to break the mold after the success of those two albums, especially since their last attempt to break the mold had been their second album, Into the Unknown, an album so controversial it resulted in the album being yanked out of print and the band breaking up. So, unsurprisingly, Against the Grain continued on in a similar vein to Suffer and No Control, but it showed them at the top of their game within what had already become the established Bad Religion style.

“Modern Man” gives us one of the album’s most effective hooks right there in the opener, and even 12 years before Greg Graffin became Dr. Graffin, he was already displaying the vocabulary far beyond the average punk with lines like “I’m one big myoma that thinks my planet supports only me.” It’s maybe an oversimplification to claim Graffin as the intellectual songwriter and Gurewitz as the imaginative songwriter, but not by much. Gurewitz, on this album, gave us the clever idea of “Blenderhead,” the song that abruptly stops at a random point in the track, the powerful imagery of songs like “Turn on the Light,” and the tongue-in-cheek parody of King Crimson’s “21^st Century Schizoid Man” which Gurewitz turned into “21^st Century Digital Boy,” a song that would be re-recorded four years later for their major label debut, Stranger Than Fiction, where it would be released as one of their most successful singles. The song seemingly skewered the increasingly gadget-oriented technological revolution but it was also so drenched in irony as to leave room for interpretation. Graffin, for his part, gave us the clever “Get Off” that combines science as a metaphor for moral decay with not-so-subtle sexual innuendo, the more seriously science-based “Entropy” that does a nice job, at the top of side two, of creating an audio demonstration of the songs’ subject matter, and Graffin’s typical screeds against religion like the unsubtly titled “God Song.” One of the few Bad Religion albums with songs not written by Graffin or Gurewitz, bassist Jay Bantley’s “The Positive Aspect of Negative Thinking” with its lyrics like “We’ve nestled in its hollow / And we’ve suckled at its breast / Grandiloquent in attitude / Impassioned yet inept” leaves me wondering if these guys just sit around reading SAT prep vocabulary books on their tour bus.

I think this album is pretty often looked at as a stepping stone to their later major-label success, but I wanted to make an argument for sitting down to appreciate this album for what it is on its own. And I hope I’ve done that. With a whopping total of 17 albums to their name, and most of them pretty good (those Atlantic years without Gurewitz being the only truly bad era of the band), it’s easy for one brilliant album in a catalogue containing a lot of brilliant albums to get lost. Against the Grain may not have as many great hooks as Suffer, No Control, and Stranger than Fiction, but the band’s razor-sharp wit, extreme intelligence, and fiery, furious hardcore style was out in full force on this album.