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.
Epitaph – 23 Nov 1990
The finale to one of the greatest punk trifectas
I’ve got this theory. It’s pretty stupid, but I’m sticking with it. It goes like this: more often than not, regardless of what any modern artist’s greatest creation is, the one that usually sticks with you most is the first NEW creation that came out after you discovered that artist. For me, it’s the novel Small Gods by the late Sir Terry Pratchett, or the OAV mini-series Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket. I’d already been introduced to the respective franchises these belong to, but these were the FIRST new ones that I got to experience.
And so it goes with Bad Religion‘s 1990 opus Against the Grain. After the band’s reformation, they put out two spectacular albums— 1988’s No Control and 1989’s Suffer— in such quick succession that even Spotify’s Daniel Ek would be all like “slow down!” I slotted in sometime in the spring of 1990 and, a bit over one year after Suffer, Bad Religion dropped Against the Grain, and completed what I consider to be one of the greatest punk trifectas of all time.
AtG was a continuation of what BR had done on the previous two albums. The songs across all three are almost invariably blisteringly fast and, often, quite short. In a way, though, it was also a culmination. Some of the songs were a bit more fleshed out. A bit more dramatic and composed. Showing more maturity, Bad Religion adds more depth to their already anthemic choruses, and even slows down considerably for the tracks “Faith Alone” and “21st Century Digital Boy.”
Among it all, these three albums are akin to a smash and grab but, with Greg Graffin’s mind-bendingly fast vocal delivery and thesaurus of $5 words, maybe more of a Smash and Grab by the local Mensa chapter. To a kid whos real first introduction to punk was a couple of years earlier via The Dead Milkmen‘s Big Lizard in My Backyard and M.O.D.‘s U.S.A. for M.O.D., it was titillating to hear someone using words that I used a lot (I was/am such a freaking book nerd).
Such a great trifecta of albums.
So great…
… but that’s where the rub is. The one common, and justified, criticism of these albums is that, well, the songs start to blend together and sound the same. If you shut your mind off you can make it through all three and not really notice that much when the songs change over. Like the candle that burns twice as bright, they burned twice as fast, and I burned out of Bad Religion by the time Generator came out an unfathomably long 1.5 years afterward. I honestly couldn’t scrounge up any level of excitement about Generator. Bad Religion had sucked me dry with those three albums and I was done.
Throughout the decades I have been able to revisit BR’s later releases and feel that, sure, Generator is actually pretty darn good and I should’ve given it, and latter releases, more of a chance. But I still think a big part of the spark was, and has been, mostly missing in subsequent releases. The urgency that Against the Grain and the two before it has generally been diminished. The Atlantic years saw a mixed bag of good songs interspersed with ones so forgettable that I can’t even recall what they sound like without listening again. But the band had just… slowed down overall. They didn’t provide that high tempo bite that drew me to them in the first place. This is supposition on my part, but I suspect they were “asked” by Atlantic to re-record a better polished (and, hence, lifeless) version of “21st Century Digital Boy” for their Atlantic debut (a common occurrence for punk bands making their major label jump in the mid-90s).
Bad Religion are a good band. They are an important band not just in punk, but in the pantheon of music as a whole. But, like my theory from the start, to me Against the Grain is hands down their best. It was the first album of theirs that was released after I discovered their music. The AtG tour was the one and only time I got to see a show at the original Medusa’s in Chicago. It is the end cap to an excellent trio of punk albums that still resonate to this day. I can, and still do, listen to this and its two predecessors regularly.
the white drew carey (aka – Jeff Sorley) is the founder and head editor of TGEFM. He’s lived (outside of) Chicago, Madison WI, (ugh) Penn State, Lyon FR, Oxford UK, central New Jersey, and now within earshot of SFO in the Bay Area. When not scouring the web for more great bands and labels to post about, he also spends time drawing (mostly) silly sci-fi and anime stuff under the name Asplenia Studios.
