All right folks it’s about time we got around to this band. Now I have had some limited exposure to these guys when I was younger, enough to be familiar with their extremely distinctive sound, but I never really listened to them very much.
Since Gloob and Madchef excoriated me for omitting the first Bad Religion album, I’m including it here as well, so you can consider this a ~2-in-1~ review. Both of these albums are super short anyway (under 30 minutes) so it’s simple enough just to do them together.
So anyway their first album was How Could Hell Be Any Worse? (1982). These guys were a good example of how “skate punk” grew out of the L.A. hardcore scene, along with their contemporaries like the Descendents. Even more so than on their later stuff, you can hear the hardcore origins, especially in the vocals (which are a bit screamier/raspier) and their use of sudden tempo changes, also something that is related to hardcore afaik. But famously these guys had a distinctive sense of melody that set them apart, and even here on this early album you can hear those minor-key melodies that paradoxically give the energetic music a sort of melancholy feel.
So this album is interesting to hear the origins of the band, and the development of their distinctive style, but I’m gonna be honest folks I wasn’t wrong to leave this one out, it’s not THAT good ffs. The biggest problem with it is that the first song is by FAR the best song on the album, and the album gets a little boring after that due to inconsistent songwriting. Now it is true that this album was super influential (apparently it was one of Zack de la Rocha’s favorite albums as a teenager), and I can understand how the relentlessly pessimistic political messages of these songs could resonate with ~disaffected youths~ in suburban California. And the numerous songs criticizing religion and televangelists are charmingly dated. But lbh this band got way better in the later 80s.
Interestingly there are some things they do here that they would abandon later as they refined their sound. Actually that first song “We’re Only Gonna Die” has a nice middle section where they slow it down and bring in acoustic guitars and even piano. Also throughout the album there’s a leaning toward a sort of hard rock influence in some of the guitar work, which you can hear in a riff here, a lick there, etc. There’s also way more emphasis on lead guitar/soloing than I’m used to hearing from Bad Religion.
Apparently the following year these guys did a bizarre 180 and released a fucking PROG ROCK album called Into the Unknown which features a space scene/planets on the front cover and has a pretty terrible reputation, lmao actually I’m kinda curious about it but I’m gonna skip it for now. Anyway the band broke up soon after and fans thought Bad Religion was done for good.
But in the later 80s these guys reunited, all the same guys actually (with the addition of a 2nd guitarist), and they put out Suffer. Let me tell you, listening to these two albums back to back, the difference is as clear as night and day. This album absolutely WHIPS ass. This is the sound of a band finally “finding their sound” and single-mindedly refining it. The various musical frills that they had experimented with in the past are GONE, and here we have 15 short and powerful songs that just hit you BAM one after the other. Every song here is better than every song on the first album. Right away on the first track “You Are (The Government)” you can tell this is gonna be something special. First of all the production is obviously better, but more importantly the music is better too. The riffs are more powerful and distinctive, and especially the melodies are absolutely terrific, catchy, and with a bit of an uncanny darkness to them.
Now sure you could say this album feels a little “samey” but when the songs are this good (and the album is this short) it doesn’t matter. In the title track when he says “the masses of humanity have always had to suffer,” man, you believe it.
One thing I think is kinda funny is that compared to the first album, the lyrics here mostly cover the same topics (humanity is doomed and it’s all our own dumbass fault), but this time around they are heavily “thesaurusized”, so you get gems like “phantasmal myriads of sane bucolic birth” and “you’re a sidewalk cipher speaking prionic jive”, lmao.
It’s also worth pointing out that the cover art places this album explicitly in suburbia – increasingly the primary audience for punk rock heading into the 90s, rather than cities. (Also I think Green Day spent their entire career ripping off the song “What Can You Do?”)
Does Bang want to listen to this? YES.
The Davis Collective 