"Coming For You" is a banal slab of commercial-bait pop rock that blatantly rips off The Black Keys, "Army of One" is a speedy, Rise Against-ish bit of filler that coasts by on a repetitive vocal melody and an eyeroll-inducing 'anthemic' chorus, there's a random and pretentious cover of "In The Hall of the Mountain King" that's a propos of absolutely nothing and serves no purpose other than to pad out the runtime, and "We Never Have Sex Anymore" is- f*ck, what am I saying, just look at that title, it literally speaks for itself. There's a laziness that permeates throughout the entire album the band never manages to shake. Anger days that nobody wanted in the first place.Įven disregarding the blatantly unpolished and unfinished production job on this record, the songs are quite bad regardless. It all sounds like Bob Rock going back to his roots - the roots - and harkening back to the St. The effects and EQ on Dexter's voice sound particularly miserable - he's always in front of the mix, the instruments left so far behind in the background that it often sounds like he's singing over a karaoke track.
The production on Let the Bad Times Roll is horrendous - everything is over-compressed to hell, causing the instruments and arrangements to blend together into a singular, amorphous pile of noise. They were never my cup of punk rock tea, and even so, I felt a wave of disappointment crash over me when I heard album opener "This Is Not Utopia" all the same, with the one-two punch of the track's godawful hook - "the ROOTS, the ROOTS" - and the god- awful production hitting me like a nasty headache. But that's the extent of my love for the band. I really liked Americana (and Ignition to a lesser extent), "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" is a pleasant little butt-rock Internet anthem, and as a kid, I always enjoyed hearing "Way Down The Line" and the untouchable "All I Want" pop up while blazing through Crazy Taxi. Now, I wouldn't classify myself as an Offspring fan - too much mediocre material in the 2000's and beyond, methinks. And unfortunately, this resulted in Let the Bad Times Roll, a truly miserable and tone-deaf record with an album title that really just says it all. And to his credit, he actually went on to get a doctorate.īut, at the same time, he and the aging boys decided to keep making music. Holland seemed to have realized this from a pretty early age. dated? Perhaps this is one of the pitfalls with getting into a "youthful" genre like pop punk to begin with - you get so used to crafting material within that genre's sphere of influence that you're musically unequipped for when your shelf life inevitably ends. And while it's admirable that they're still trying to make the music that defined them and put them on the map to begin with, one has to wonder: why? Why not move on and experiment with a genre that will make you seem less. Blink-182, Green Day, Jimmy Eat World: all of these bands' time in the sun have just passed already. Bands in this subculture have a limited lifespan as a result of this youthful image that the genre has - some of them wisely call it quits once they reach their "twilight years" (probably their late 30's or so), like Yellowcard, but some of them keep going and become somewhat irrelevant as a result. Punk rock and pop punk are very 'young' genres, pop punk in particular being emblematic of rebellious youth and teenage angst. Not only does this bring to light the more studious side of the man - a side you probably wouldn't associate with or expect from a punk artist - it shows an interesting level of maturity and foresight. Now this is interesting for a number of reasons. In an interview he had with Bravo, circa 1995, he claimed: "I won’t wanna play music when I’m forty, I’d rather be a professor at a university," with a noted interest in biochemistry and molecular biology. Here's something interesting I recently learned about Dexter Holland, frontman for The Offspring. Review Summary: No need to ask and no need to care, yeah.