Nite Songs

Well, we did the intro yesterday and I guess we can't put this off any longer unfortunately. Hold yer noses, we're going in, the Nite Songs Worst 50 Albums Ever countdown officially starts here... *** 50. BAD RELIGION - "Into The Unknown" (1983) Of course, nowadays Bad Religion are rightly hailed as a seminal LA punk band (we'll ignore the fact that Brett Gurewitz's Epitaph label was responsible for inflicting the musical abortion that is Falling In Reverse on the world in recent years) but it almost didn't happen like that. Following their furious 1982 debut How Could Hell Be Any Worse? , the group decided on a radical change of direction by going prog, complete with synthesisers. I mean, fair play, they weren't the only early US punk band to try a change of sound that confused their fans (fellow early '80s hardcore types TSOL infamously first went goth/art-rock and then biker rock) but it's safe to say that jumping over to the sort of music ...

  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 movemen...