Rancid
Honor Is All We Know
Epitaph (2014)
For years I was the biggest Rancid fan. The first record I didn’t buy on its release date was B-Sides & C-Sides, and that’s because I already had the songs. I was an unapologetic completest. As the post-2000 records have been coming, I became an apologetic completest. I bought the double album version of Let the Dominoes Fall and spun it a fair amount that first month…but rarely since.When October 2014 came with promise of the new Honor Is All We Know, I didn’t bother to get it right away. I’d heard a version of the song via Tim’s one-a-day project and, well, it’s another new Rancid song with “we” in the title. That right there sums up where things have gone wrong. Where, for years, the band’s strength was in their storytelling lyricism, mixing autobiographical with fictional tales of urban blight, recent records have revolved more heavily along the “we’re still here” theme. The band that was classified as street punk with an asterisk, has now become that genre to a fault.While the songs on Honor Is All We Know are often catchy—so catchy you can sing along on first listen—they aren’t really about anything at all. “Power Inside,” … Read more
Various Artists
Clockwork Orange County: The Rise of West Coast Punk Rock
MVD Visual (2014)
Detailing the history of southern California punk of the late 1970s and early ‘80s and in particular, the scene that … Read more
Weeping Rat
Tar
Handmade Birds (2015)
Tar has been an insane surprise for me. Even though the album was released back in December, I did not … Read more
Foo Fighters
Sonic Highways
RCA (2014)
With their newest release, Sonic Highways, we aptly find Foo Fighters at an apparent crossroads and no longer content to … Read more
