BAD RELIGION
Process of belief
LP/CD, Epitaph
As
so many other people, I dropped out of listening to Bad Religion some years
ago. For me, it all started with “Suffer” and “No Control” – yes,
I am that old – and I felt the next records after these two to be just a
watered down recap of the first two. So I lost interest. The last record I
bought and listened to by Bad Religion was “Recipe for hate” and even
though I found some interesting stuff on that, I lost interest because I
went deeper underground. Bad Religion had become too “big” for me. Yes,
I was young then, in 1993. I don’t know much about Bad Religion in the
following years, except seeing their videos on Music-TV and reading their
interviews in magazines, all of which told me, that nothing much had
changed, that they were still watering down the energy they once had. And
all of that still couldn’t sparkle my interest. How many people are there,
that can tell a similar story? I remember when I first saw them live,
playing with four (!) other bands for a entry-fee of about 8 Euros. The next
time around, the entrance-fee was about 25 Euros. So, fuck that. Too
“Big”. I have told that story many times. Maybe too many times, because,
when I read that Brett Gurrewitz was back in the game, that they are back on
Epitaph records and that their new record “process of belief” was
actually really good, I had to check that out.
First
off, your in for a surprise. The first and second song are very much a
return to the first two records. Fast, furious, melodic, without much ado or
ad-ons. Then the songs start to change and vary a lot. “”Can’t stop
it” is a fast reminder of the early days of hardcore with distorted vocals
and background-shouting. “Broken” is what made them big and works along
the same formula that 95 % of charts-punk does work: reduced verse – fat
chorus, all mixed with a nice melody that sticks, all of that not too fast,
so the teen-girls ain’t put off. This one even features acoustic guitars.
Songs like “Kyoto Now!” or “destined for nothing” are there to show,
that the band still has some political point. Finally, the lyrics of
“materialist” remind very much of the first records, with their
overusage of long words out of dictionaries: “You’re obsessed and
distressed ‘cuz you can’t make any sense of the ludicrous nonsense and
incipient senescence that will deem your common sense useless.”
“Evangeline” has some street-punk-feeling. Very much variety here,
surely, but somehow they pull it off to make the album feel as a whole. A
whole that starts off very angry and fast and then starts to drag a little
with time, with the old energy pulsing through here and there. They even
manage to bring some originality into the genre, e.g. with the reggae-intro
in “sorrow” or the pop-appeal of “epiphany”.
So,
what really has changed? Simple answer, me. Yeah, I am old now. Nearly 30
years old, but the guys in Bad Religion are even some older than me and
still they keep the posture of juvenile rebellion. I am way beyond that, but
I do share a sense of serenity as well as nostalgia towards the notion of
rebellion with and through punkrock. Otherwise they wouldn’t keep on doing
it and I wouldn’t keep on listening to it. There just has to be more than
a consumer / producer – relationship between us. There just has to be.
Another
thing about age. Brett Gurrewitz starts to get grey hair and he is a
successful business man, operating Epitaph records and a recording studio. I
guess, all members of Bad Religion lead rather comfortable lifes, very much
like their main audience – middle class white teens and twens. This
ain’t the eighties any more. Punkrock as built up its very own kind of
capitalism – the way any alternative structure does when it gets fixed.
The main point is to keep on your belief and not to forget all of what you
once held for good and eternal, while you make your own career.
