Capsule reviews

From Autumn to Ashes – “Live At Looney Tunes”
(Vagrant Records)

This live offering by From Autumn to Ashes, recorded live at New York’s Looney Tunes, sounds fantastic. It’s the crispest, cleanest, live cd I’ve heard in a good long while. Still, despite this being a good live album, I still can’t tell as to the difference between FATA and Poison the Well. They both sound so much alike, it’s frightening – breakdowns, screaming and singing vocals that alternate back and forth, etc. And now the band’s on an indefinite hiatus, so this is for all intents and purposes their farewell recording. It’s not a bad finale, but it’s pretty much just… there.

Reggie & the Full Effect – “Last Stop: Crappy Town”
(Vagrant Records)

Speaking of finales, this is pretty much the last Reggie & the Full Effect record, as well. There’s a good interview with James Dewees where he talks about the making of the record and what went into the lyrics, and why it has the song structure it does (everything named after subway stops). It’s fucking depressing. Drug abuse, divorce, and yes, it does all end with redemption… but this is the record about that. While songs about the worst part of a person’s life can be amazing (see “Waiting For My Man,” “53rd and 3rd”), an entire album is just bleak. The last Reggie album, Songs Not to Get Married To was about the aftermath of a divorce, but still managed to find some of the whimsy inherent in Under the Tray and Greatest Hits. Last Stop: Crappy Town has no whimsy. It’s pretty much entirely without humor, and there’s no Sean Ingram cameo, no Common Denominator track… nothing fun. It’s a bleak album about coming back from the depths, and manages to sound like Coalesce without being enjoyable.

the Offspring – “Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace”
(Columbia Records)

There seems to be a common thread of disappointment running within these reviews. The new offering from the Offspring is their first in five years, and I’m thinking that the time off did not benefit the band. Dexter Holland and company seem to have been listenign to a lot of classic rock lately. As I’ve said before, this sounds like a cross between your basic SoCal punk formula (melodic singing over fast riffs; see also: Bad Religion, Pennywise), Dokken, and White Lion. It’s awful. The band has always had a cetain tongue-in-cheek aspect that made them palatable. Rolling Stone‘s review of Conspiracy of One made favorable comparisons to Tom Lehrer, and I think that’s pretty accurate. The band’s always had a bit of a sarcastic view of things, and that skewed sense of humor is what’s made the band as famous as it’s gotten. Sadly, the closest the Offspring come on Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace is “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid” and it’s “dance fucker dance.” The vaguely political allusions made on the lead-off single “Hammerhead” just do not suit a band best known for “Pretty Fly For A White Guy.” Just because “The Kids Aren’t Alright” did all right does ot give you tacit approval to talk about the war.