Good Day.

Monday was a good day.

Rock Band 2

Yep, you read that right. Rock Band 2 was announced on June 30th. Read the IGN article here.

Not really sure how I feel about this. I was totally surprised, and it has the potential to be totally awesome. And yet... how many more plastic instruments do I really need? None.

But... how many more plastic instruments am I going to buy? Some.

Sigh...

Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace - A CD in Review

-The Offspring-

Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace

The Offspring may be old, but apparently they're not quite finished. They're latest offering: Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace kind of came out of nowhere for me. I used to religiously check the band's website up until recently, and earlier there had been rumors about "...we're in the studio. Yep. Makin' music all right." but not much other than that. Then one day it was like BOOSH!: New Offspring CD, June 17th! Purchase.

So a couple things before I get started. 1) This CD is CHEAP. I bought it for a very competitively priced $9.99 at my local Best Buy retailer only a few days ago. The price point alone warrants anyone with a relative liking of the band to spend their last ten dollars on an Offspring album instead of ten McChicken sandwiches or 2.3 gallons of gas. 2) The Offspring have officially been reduced to a Green Day style three-man ensemble since (I assume) Splinter's release. They have had no official drum dude since Ron Welty left, but the same fill-in drum dude from Splinter is on this album. So there, that's that.

#1 - Half-Truism is a very weird opening track for this album. Its got a sort of rock-anthemy feel to it, but its also kinda meandery during the chorus and doesn't totally slap you in the face and say "Here we go dog!" like their previous releases do. It also sets the sort of quasi-political tone that pervades the majority of the album.

#2 - Trust In You is a quintessential Offspring song, nothing more and nothing less. Not bad by any respect, but also nothing that makes it sound any different than the usual "not quite as catchy but still cool" tracks on their older albums. It follows a very set Offspringy pattern of vocals, and has a predictable bass solo two-thirds through. There is an interesting sounding riff in the guitar solo, almost like they took what they knew was gonna be something super-familiar and tried to make it sound a little different. Classic Offspring; for better or worse.

#3 - You're Gonna Go Far, Kid is probably best described as "Emo-Funk", and is totally awesome. It is the first track on this album that sounds like "Oh yeah, that's the Offspring but I haven't heard this one before." Mostly the way this effect is achieved is that they make a completely different type of catchy Offspring song, making use of very rhythmic drum and vocal play (a la Fall Out Boy) and also doing some totally funky guitar stuff in between.

#4 - Hammerhead was the first single released off of this album. Its a totally solid track, blending older sounding traditional punk with newer sounding drum work and guitar solos that make it sound fresh. It has a lot more in common with something off Americana than the other tracks on this CD, and by that I mean that sort of awkward go-between rock/punk sound that that album had but somehow made it totally awesome. It isn't as nauseatingly catchy as previous singles like Hit That but it sets a good tone for the album overall.

#5 - A Lot Like Me is the first of one too many "rock ballad" type songs of RAF, RAG (I didn't come up with that acronym). In this song, Dexter Holland drops is high-pitched yelly singing voice for his more pleasant, more emotional, and more powerful vocal style (very Gone Away from Ixnay). Like Ixnay the track brings the upbeat rhythm locomotive that has built up steam in the previous songs to a screeching halt. Unlike Ixnay this is not the only time this happens, but is probably the least jarring.

#6 - Takes Me Nowhere does an excellent job of getting the album going again with a very predictable but no less enjoyable song that has ties in something like Come Out Swinging from Conspiracy of One. Unfortunately this momentum is again thrown to the wayside for...

#7 - Kristy, Are You Doing Okay? Is she? I'm not sure. This acoustic half-love song and half-opus to a person I have no idea actually exists feels completely out of place here. The majority of this album has a sort of angst-filled fast pace. This thing just sticks out like a sore thumb.

#8 - Nothingtown has the same sort of satire-esque fake pep and happiness that a lot of Splinter had, and it is totally awesome. Its just sing-songy enough to be catchy without being annoying and just sarcastic enough to keep it from being tiring. As an added bonus, it also happens to be about the greater Fresno area.

#9 - Stuff Is Messed Up would easily be my choice for favorite song off this album. However its a bit of a misnomer, because according to the Offspring "Shit is fucked up!"; there is no stuff being messed here. Everything about this song is totally awesome, from the chanty begging and strange half-rapping that Dexter does to the humor of the lyrics and the chorus: "Shit is Fucked Up!". This song feels like a total throwback to what put them on the map: angry punk guitar and drums mixed with interesting lyrics (Bad Habit, Burn It Up, L.A.P.D.). They even return to their characteristic backup vocal style, only now its "La la la" instead of "Yeah yeah yeah". This song is, in a word: Boss.

#10 - Fix You rated on an awkward scale would land somewhere between 7 and 9. Stuff Is Messed Up gets you all pumped up and ready to go, and then Fix You forces you to drum up images of trees passing by car windows in autumn and Dexter Holland singing to the sky unapolagetically. Wank. This song (like the other "slower" songs) isn't really bad, but feels totally out of place. This is also the most boring of the three.

#11 - Let's Hear It For Rock Bottom is easily the most "emo" of the tracks on offer here. Its Jimmy Eat World meets All-American Rejects meets The Offspring; almost in tangible chunks. Catchy song and super awesome, with the Offspring contrubuting their patented "steel-drum" sounding guitar segments to the equation. This song also somehow rings to the feelings of the band (and perhaps after how Splinter totally bombed and Conspiracy didn't do overly well before it.) "Wasting away / We're hitting rock bottom / Call me anyway / Cause I got two friends / Wasting away / We're going down together / And all in all its not so bad" for example.

#12 - Rise And Fall is a very fitting ending track the blends the sing-songy and the hard punk of the rest of the album, but doesn't stand out that well on its own.

As an album Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace is by no means bad. In fact it posseses a lot of what diehard fans of the band enjoy most, and what the more recent releases have been lacking. However what prevents it from rising into the bracket that Smash and Americana currently occupy is that it feels sorta... choppy. Just when the CD really gets going they throw a spike strip down in front of it and a melodic rock ballad becomes kind of an annoyance. This album is like driving a car with a sticky transmission, and it randomly lurches on you.

The political nature of this album I would have to say is just right. It is present if you look for it but is in no way as overbearing or blatant as what other bands have put out in the past. This is not an album where the political undertones (or overtones in the case of other groups) will render it completely irrelevant in a decade or so. And those same undertones when viewed from a different angle can just as easily be attributed to other aspects of life.

I realize there are a lot of references to past material in this review, but I mean, what do you expect in a group that has been around so long? You can't honestly expect a new album from a band that has been around for almost twenty years to be completely ground-breaking, can you? I think that at this point it is more about how much to change, and how much to remain the same; which is why I included all of the references to the band's older stuff. Some things have changed (such as the very conspicuous lack of "whoas", "yeahs", and "ohs") but the heart of the music more or less remains, and I think that is what fans of the group will want. Something that is less a recycling and more a re-imagining. The band attempted to take their signature sound and tweak to just enough to sound fresh while keeping the foundation intact. Whether they succeeded or not is really a matter of personal opinion, but I applaud them for putting out a new release in 2008, when they could have just as easily ridden the "Greatest Hits" wave into retirement.

And not to mention: the older Dexter Holland gets, the more his backup vocals sound like they are being sung by Weird Al Yankovic, which is totally awesome.

B+