Album Review: The Offspring - "Let The Bad Times Roll"

 

Hooooooo boy. It's safe to say that I have had my ups and downs with the Offspring's music over the years. When they first broke through with 1994's Smash and the attendant hits Come Out And Play and Self-Esteem, it felt like they were something new and exciting - along with Green Day, forging a new path for American pop-punk aimed squarely at the teenage market with a suitably juvenile sense of humour but packing enough anger into the formula to tap into the angst anyone feels at that age.

The trouble is that with each album they kind of felt a bit less special - 1997's Ixnay on the Hombre had a few moments but generally felt a bit patchy, 1999's Americana brought them proper big league chart success with two Top 10 hits but generally felt like they were by now deliberately playing it for belly laughs and by the time of 2003's pretty poor Conspiracy of One, even the jokes weren't particularly funny anymore (the rise of the horrible frat-punk movement that spawned the odious likes of Blink 182, Good Charlotte, Sum 41 etc that Dexter, Noodles and co have to claim at least part responsibility for can't have helped either). And after that, they just sort of faded away into obscurity - indeed, I was pretty surprised to see a new album from 'em in 2021 to be honest.

So it's a pleasant surprise when This Is Not Utopia kicks in with a frenetic dose of political panic with its chorus of "This is the roots of America/The roots of hysteria!". Not what I expected at all and all the better for it. Indeed, there's a refreshingly stripped-back feel to this album with the group powering through 12 tracks in just over half an hour and with an urgency that stands in stark contrast to the phoning-it-in feel of their noughties output.

Certainly the paranoia of Behind Your Walls and the frenetic Army Of One and Breaking These Bones take you all the way back to Smash and it's good to see the Offspring rediscovering an anger and urgency that I honestly thought they'd lost about quarter of a century ago. The old-skool glam stomp of Coming For You and the rewriting of Gone Away from Ixnay as a stark piano ballad shows that they're not just clinging to their pop-punk security blanket here either. Oh sure, it's not all plain sailing - We Never Have Sex Anymore is a bit of an unnecessary throwback to the Americana album and the band do sound like they're repeating themselves a bit on some of the later tracks (always a bit of an issue with the Offspring if I'm honest). But still, Let The Bad Times Roll is really a much better album than it has any right to be and shows that the Offspring are still very much out there with something to say in 2021. Blimey, who saw that coming?

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