there’s this weird impulse among punks to despise improvement. part of it comes from distrusting anything that sounds too polished, too professional. it’s supposed to be d.i.y. or die, a different paradigm from the rest of the overproduced, artificial music industry.
part of it, though, is borne out of a resentment that things cannot be as they once were. punks are heavily nostalgic, decrying anything that deviates from “genre conventions” that were established before their parents learned how to drive. this is why Bad Religion, the LA-based punk band that started in 1982, has been playing the same music since roughly 1988 and their third full-length, Suffer. most people at this point know about Bad Religion’s second album, the proggy, synth-filled Into The Unknown, but it feels to me sometimes like they don’t quite put together that that album is why Bad Religion has basically never deviated from the song structures and lyrical ideas that both made them popular and proliferated through the 90s “melodic hardcore” scene in the ensuing 30 years.
listening to their most recent album, Age of Unreason, again after a while, you can kind of tell that Graffin, Gurewitz and the rest of the six-piece band is starting to get tired of playing the same things, over and over again, for decades. or at least, they’re tired of playing it raw. the very first song on this album, “Chaos from Within,” starts in characteristically explosive fashion, with everyone singing “Cowering like settlers on someone else’s land!” but there’s something weirdly too perfect about how all the vocals are layered on top of each other. this feeling that maybe they did too good a job of lining everyone’s vocal tracks up lasts throughout the song. and you notice that everything else – from the almost-robotic drumming coming from Jamie Miller to the just-right amount of distortion on Mike Dimkich, Brian Baker and Brett Gurewitz’s triple-guitar attack – sounds just a little bit too perfect. like everyone’s dialed in, but maybe too much? is that possible?
“My Sanity” is meant to be a song like “Sorrow” and “Fields of Mars,” a song designed to show off the band’s chops when it comes to making those kind of ol’ reliable Tony Hawk-ass songs. what I notice listening now is how good Greg Graffin’s voice has gotten. if you’re not aware, Graffin has his own solo project where he sings bluegrass and country-rock to his heart’s content. in 2017 he released an album with members of Social Distortion called Millport that is the most full-throated expression of this other side of the punk frontman. “My Sanity,” despite adhering to the instrumentation standards Bad Religion has always displayed, could have just as easily been an outtake from Millport. from twangy riffs that evoke that same California-style country rock vibe to lyrics like “my life is a song/a short melody/harmonizing with reality/I’ve got it real bad/there’s no remedy/my world picture is exemplary” it’s just like… yeah, this is a country song lmao.
I can’t really blame Graffin tho. after spending four decades singing the same punk song in 500 slight variations, I’d want to do something a bit different too.
“Do the Paranoid Style” references American historian Richard J. Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” as its historical/theoretical bludgeon to both-sides people with. “Hey kids on the right and left/do you feel dispossessed?/If you’re on the left or right/I feel your pain tonight/So shake off reality/It’s easy as you please/Soon everyone is dancin’ ’cause we’re all told to lead.” Bad Religion has been annoyingly centrist for decades so like, it’s not new, but you know, maybe 2019 was a bad year to fence-sit.
the album is filled with songs like this, by the way; it’s not just a one-off. The very next song, “The Approach,” is a nominally anti-war song with the line “Philosophically moribund, revolution hasn’t a chance.” again, they’ve held this line forever, but maybe 2019 was a bad year for it? musically, the song has a nice callback to the 2010 song “The Resist Stance,” which was neat to discover. “Lose Your Head,” the next song, is another song trying to get the listener to stay calm in the Unprecedented Times they (we) faced. one line I actually really enjoy is “Religion, who needs it? / And by the way how should we bury our dead?” there’s just something about this line that tickles the malformed infant sociologist in me, a spark of realization that religious doctrine started as a means of organizing ancient society. I also like “There’s an accident waiting to happen/At all times anyway/And maybe we’d all benefit from/Some epistemic humility.” also, this song sounds like it could be played at a school dance right before the last slow jam of the night. “Soon we’ll all be dead, yeah.” cool dudes!
“End of History” does genuinely rock. at the same time that it’s a callback-classic Bad Religion song, it starts with Graffin singing “Halcyon days are not a thing/ Nostalgia is no excuse for stupidity” in a way that I can just envision Rodney Mullen or Steve Caballero doing an absolutely demented board trick off of it into the face of a Trump supporter. I’d listen to this over and over in a Bad Religion greatest hits playlist, for sure.
The title track, on the other hand, is a meandering mess of a song that vaguely calls back to songs like “Social Suicide” and “Flat Earth Society” that indulges in what I think is Bad Religion’s most decadent habit: proclaiming the coming apocalypse. I’ve got nothing much else to say about this song or the next one: “Candidate,” another country album outtake.
“Faces of Grief” picks shit back up with a dissonant hardcore riff and Jamie Miller counting us in from in the back with a yelled “ONE TWO THREE FOUR.” “Radicalized evangelicals/Awash in primate chemicals/Bare shiny fangs for all to see/A rictus of misogyny!” is just one sick verse here, reminding us that when Bad Religion is on, they’re fucking on, bro. it’s also a reminder that Jay Bentley is a fucking virtuoso bassist, something he doesn’t often get to show off. anyway, this is not the new direction of the album, as “Old Regime” sets us right back in the old familiar Bad Religion rut.
“Big Black Dog” is clearly supposed to be Bad Religion’s attempt at ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man,” and it’s the song I’m least into, despite being something different from both that rut and the country rock fare. “Downfall” similarly taps into this Hard Rawk template and kind of just falls flat. “Since Now” is Bad Religion doing Green Day (at least at first). and then we get to the album’s closer: “What Tomorrow Brings.”
if you’ve been listening to Bad Religion for a while, you know that for the last few albums they like to save their most “epic” (read: emotionally affecting) song for the outro. see: “Fields of Mars,” “Changing Tide,” “I Won’t Say Anything” and “Live Again (The Fall of Man).” “What Tomorrow Brings” is very much in line with these other album closers. it sums the album up and puts a bit of a hopeful spin on things, like a bit of sunlight peaking through an otherwise roiling storm cloud. one thing I noted when listening to this song specifically a few days ago was just how good Graffin’s voice sounded on it. like I think out of all the pop-punk singers from the 90s, Greg Graffin’s maybe the only one with actual pipes, and they’re on full display in “What Tomorrow Brings.” it’s beautiful. in that sense, the song definitely does its job for me.
Age of Unreason is a frustrating album. it features many moments of genuine beauty and heartfelt emotion, but these moments struggle to shine through both the repetitive, formulaic, overly-polished and tired tracks and the hamfisted experiments in form. it resists outright rejection, at least from me, because of those beautiful moments, but at every turn I’m also reminded of how much this band, like a lot of old punks, resists the understanding that things can’t ever be as they were again.