Bad Religion

I Bad Religion formed in 1980 in the bohemian area of Melrose Avenue. Greg Graffin on vocals, Brett Gurewitz on guitar, Pete Finestone on drums, and Jay Bentley on bass were not very different from many other beach-punk �bands� of the era. They too benefited from the explosion of interest in 1981 and, thanks to more �adult� lyrics, found themselves at the forefront of the hardcore wave, where they would remain for about twelve years, with minimal stylistic changes. Perhaps it was precisely their consistency that elevated them above the crowd.

The highs and lows of their career do not detract from the fact that Bad Religion wrote some of the most important pages in recent rock history and earned their place in the pantheon of the 1980s. Graffin, Gurewitz, and Bentley form a trio of �authors� with few rivals in rock history, and in their later works, their expressive abilities reached new heights.

The sound of the first EP, Bad Religion (Epitaph, 1981), was fairly conventional hardcore, �chanting� rather than singing over the frantic thrash rhythms of the rhythm section, with minimal use of riffs and solos. Sarcastic socio-political invectives like Bad Religion, Politics, World War III, and Slaves stand out for their programmatic commitment, unusual for a generation mainly concerned with lamenting their own moral miseries; yet Sensory Overload hinted at a melodic inclination unknown to most, and Drastic Actions carried the slow, sinister, martial gait of British gothic.

The first album was recorded at night in the attic on Melrose Avenue. There are few similarities between the hardcore of How Could Hell Be Any Worse (Epitaph, 1982) and that of the previous EP. The harmonies are complex, the arrangements intense, the rhythms irregular, and the solos multiple. The only constant is perhaps the vocals, still rather monotone, and the very short duration of the songs. Bad Religion�s thesis is that we live in a paradoxical world, a monstrous aberration, and reflecting that thesis, their music is played and sung with a style somewhere between the absurd and the surreal.
The album opens with a song that could easily be a vaudeville nursery rhyme rather than a punk anthem: We're Only Gonna Die, which may remain their peak of ferocity. The quartet, however, has solid roots in rock history: in We're Only Gonna Die, Gurewitz�s guitar has the dry tone of Dave Davies in You Really Got Me, while in Latch Key Kids it launches a canonical thrash riff reminiscent of Mick Jones (Clash); and Part III is a dizzying Led Zeppelin-style rock and roll (with Finestone in a frenzied Bonham role). Various sources combine to create a imaginative, driving, and even whistleable hardcore, culminating in the ferocious manifesto Fuck Armageddon This Is Hell.
Bad Religion remain among the top of their class in high-speed thrash, as in White Trash. The lesson of early punk rock (especially the boogie-derived Dead Boys) forms the foundation of their most violent bursts, particularly Into The Night. On the more melodic side, the album includes the vocal harmonies of American Dream, the satirical chorus Voice Of God Is Government, and the demonic ballad Damned To Be Free, all of which are unprecedented. These three tracks express their existential malaise and distrust of society using a more accessible sound. As the political message intensifies, the musical firepower decreases.

Bad Religion totally changed course on Into The Unknown (Epitaph, 1983): the supersonic hardcore of the beginnings was abandoned for a baroque psychedelic sound a` la Paisley Underground. Graffin even employed a synthesizer to compose most of the (very catchy) songs and his keyboards dominate the arrangements. The relatively speedy It's Only Over When (although hardly so compared with the first album) evokes the New York Dolls. The rocking and jumping Losing Generation could be from a Todd Rundgren or a Yes album of the 1970s. Most songs concoct strange hybrids: Billy Gnosis overlaps Merseybeat and Lynyrd Skynyrd; The Dichotomy alternates between the Hollies and Elton John; the limping bluesy singalong Chasing The Wild Goose resurrects Creedence Clearwater Revival and ZZ Top. On the positive side, the album was an affirmation of Graffin's melodic talent, that was obviously huge. However, the seven-minute spaced-out Syd Barrett-ian lullaby and prog-rock suite Time And Disregard is a massive failure.

Graffin, who had initially retreated to live in his native Wisconsin, joined former Circle Jerks guitarist Greg Hetson and bassist Tim Gallegos and assembled material for a new EP, Back To The Known (Epitaph, 1984). An uncertain, transitional work, it nevertheless includes a couple of classics: Along The Way, a slow, martial chorus accompanied by a Cream-style wah-wah; and the explosive power-pop of New Leaf and Yesterday. Graffin�s vision of the contemporary world remained catastrophic.

Once the trend passed, even Bad Religion ran out of opportunities to play and record. The band seemed extinct, but like many others of the era, it was rediscovered toward the end of the decade and, buoyed by growing legend, was able to return to action. Unlike most comebacks of this genre, Suffer (Epitaph, 1988) is even wilder and more stripped-down than their early works. Bad Religion had not matured at all�in fact, they had become angrier. Screaming invectives like 1,000 More Fools, Land Of Competition, What Can You Do, and especially Pessimistic Lines, compressed into just over a minute and carried by a catchy melody, as well as the epic, breakneck war cry of You Are The Government, drip with adolescent frustration as in early punk rock�or better, as in all generational expressions from Dylan to The Who. The guitar axis of the volcanic Gurewitz and Hetson again leverages the rhythm section of the powerful Bentley and Finestone: a classic of classics. Graffin�s vocals have never been so modulated and expressive, capable even of intoning the desolate elegy of the title track. The quintet is at the peak of its form. It is precisely Suffer that sets the standard of melodic hardcore that would ensure the success of Bad Religion followers like Offspring and Rancid.

Without sacrificing anything of that nitroglycerin-like sound, the follow-up No Control (Epitaph, 1989) reached expressive heights that few hardcore bands have ever approached. Graffin�s vocals, always an octave below the average hardcore shriek, now acquired a rare tragic power, ideal for delivering his (erudite) Apocalypse-themed lyrics. In a sense, the album is a �concept� about the degradation of homo sapiens. The duets between Hetson and Gurewitz pour liters of adrenaline over the visionary ravings of the prophet.
While Big Bang still feeds on hardcore�s �three-chord� foundation, albeit in a guitar barrage that would make Black Flag pale, No Control uses hardcore frenzy to shape a highly emotional anthem, and I Want To Conquer The World transforms it into supersonic, finely polemical rock and roll (both count among the classics of modern socially-conscious rock, alongside the Dead Kennedys and a few others).
This does not diminish the power of the sound. The sonic force can even be more formidable, as in Sometimes I Feel Like and Billy, among the most desperate compositions of their career. The latter is a heartfelt portrait of a Lather (Jefferson Airplane) of the punk generation.
The essence of Graffin�s satirical vision is contained in tracks like Automatic Man and You (one of their peaks), which draw on vaudeville and flaunt lyrics so erudite (�the quintessential mindless modern epicene�) that they contradict the very spirit of punk. The �comic� structure suits Finestone�s obsessive drumming and Graffin�s �speak-singing� with minimal melodic modulation.
Graffin�s composure amidst the fiery tumult of the two guitars, chasing the breathless rhythm of the drums, lends an epic quality to the rallies of Progress and Anxiety, which are essentially accelerated folk ditties taken to paroxysm. Even the lightning-fast Henchman, the most conventional track of the lot, becomes in their hands a didactic, almost Brechtian nursery rhyme. The existential Calvary culminates in the desolate notes of I Want Something More. And the final cry of The World Won't Stop functions both as a war signal and a plea for help, closing this excursion into the Inferno of our era�s ills on a deeply human note.
The album is granite-like in its formal perfection and monumental in its architecture. The tracks follow each other in a continuous flow without a slowdown in pace or a drop in tone. The theme is explored obsessively along a Calvary of disturbing images. The constant bouncing between comic and tragic tones, with frequent immersions into neutral, passive, surgical rambling, makes No Control a work rich in pathos and epic scope.

Buoyed by the critical success of these albums and their now unstoppable legend, Bad Religion took the satisfaction of welcoming the new decade by recording their third album in three years. Completing the trilogy of maturity is the album Against The Grain (Epitaph, 1990), another rock work on the theme of modernity�s moral crisis. The futuristic and fatalistic anthems Modern Man and especially 21st Century Digital Boy establish the theme and mood of the album at the pace of frenzied rock and roll. The album is populated with similar �philosophical� ballads (Get Off, Entropy, God Song, Misery And Famine), sung with composed nonchalance (rather than the usual angry punk sarcasm) in Graffin�s subtly modulated register, and built around a simple chorus propelled by a bass drum to the max. The peaks of pathos (the title track, Faith Alone) feel more like ballads than rock and roll.
Gurewitz�s songs (Turn On The Light, Blenderhead, Walk Away) are slightly cheerier and �lighter�; and 21st Century Digital Boy is his personal anthem, almost his own version of Modern Man; but just a more martial emphasis can turn those little songs into apocalyptic frescoes of our era (Flat Earth Society). Every now and then, a violent Dead Kennedys-style hiccup (The Positive Aspect Of Negative Thinking or Unacceptable, both fittingly written by Bentley) recalls their origins; every now and then, a more lyrical accent (Anesthesia, another album high point) colors the song with tender despair, shifting the musical axis toward The Cure and atmospheric gothic.

As happened with other famous rock duos (notably Hart and Mould of Husker Du), an increasingly pronounced dualism develops between Graffin and Gurewitz, both excellent modern songwriters, but with styles diverging ever more sharply.

However, this marks the end of the band�s golden era. Much inferior to the albums of the trilogy is Generator (Epitaph, 1992), a haphazard record stuffed with redundant solos. Bad Religion continue their horror-planet saga with Atomic Garden, No Direction, Answer, Tomorrow, but without the incisiveness of the past. For the fatalistic vision of Generator (�like a rock/ like a planet/ like a fucking atomic bomb�), the vocal register is that of a 1950s crooner. On Too Much To Ask and Heaven Is Falling it almost sounds like the old X.

Its fortunes were immediately revived with Recipe For Hate (Epitaph, 1993), whose American Jesus, Don't Pray For Me, Skyscraper bring back past glory, with the same grim energy as always. Recipe For Hate and Struck a Nerve are perhaps the most melodic.

All Ages (Epitaph, 1995) is an anthology collecting the best of the classic period, from 1988 to 1992. 80-85 (Epitaph, 1991) covers the preceding period.

The next album, Stranger Than Fiction (Sony, 1994), marked the definitive �sell out,� establishing the band with a wider audience at a moment when dozens of their followers, from the Green Day to the Offspring, were climbing the charts. The guitar salvoes are well-oiled, and Gurewitz and Graffin experiment with new melodic patterns on Stranger Than Fiction and Infected, two of their slowest songs ever, and among the few inspired by Merseybeat, while Incomplete draws inspiration from the anthems of Motorhead. Even when the old beach-punk patterns resurface in polemical sketches like Television and Handshake, the choruses remain front and center.

At this point, Gurewitz, too busy with his worldly commitments (running the Epitaph label), gave way to the legendary Brian Baker (ex-Minor Threat, Government Issue, Meatmen, Dag Nasty, and Junkyard). The move did not promise much, since the previous albums had been dominated by his compositions.

Greg Graffin taught Evolutionary Biology at the prestigious Cornell University and, in the intervals, continued writing songs for the next Bad Religion album. In the �90s, the punk-era Jefferson Airplane retained the fresh rebellious spirit of their adolescence and a modest but proud sense of the grandeur of punk civilization.

Graffin dominated the songwriting on Gray Race (Sony, 1996), a collection that continued the progression from their original hardcore to a form of intellectual rock'n'roll, halfway between apocalyptic prophesies and sociopolitical rants. Despite its title, Punk Rock Song is one of their poppiest songs, and Pity The Dead is a close second (the Kinks on steroids), but the album also boasts the usual suspects: Gray Race is the catchy and galopping rigmarole, Them & Us couples epic riff and choral singalong, Victory is the existential anthem, Parallel unwinds a rustic hoedown, etc. However, the raspy and syncopated A Walk sounds like Bob Seger, the slow-burning ballad The Streets Of America flirts with grunge, and the burning guitar of Come Join Us borders on heavy metal. The album revived Bad Religion's status as surgical perpetrators of rousing and uptempo punk tunes.

After Greg Graffin's first solo, American Lesion (Polypetrus, 1997), proved that the band was more than the sum of its parts, No Substance (Atlantic, 1998) felt like a let down. It was full of conventional songs that cross hardcore, rock'n'roll and heavy-metal, such as Hear It and Mediocre Minds, with a peak in the panzer-grade attack of The Biggest Killer In American History. The ska-infected power-ballad Shades Of Truth and the punk-pop lullaby All Fantastic Images seemed to aim for mainstream consumption, while The Hippy Killers bordered on tv-commercial dementia (a bitter desolate self-portrait that proved their qualifications as generational spokesmen). The mildly anthemic Sowing The Seeds Of Utopia and Raise Your Voice were the best, and In So Many Ways was the existential meditation du jour. Nothing here compares with the melodic punch of Punk Rock Song and Pity The Dead. On the contrary, several of the refrains sound trivial and uninspired.

What is manifest on The New America (Atlantic, 2000), on the other hand, is the schizophrenia of these middle-aged teenagers, who can't figure out who they truly are. The glorious heroes of beach-punk are aging and can't decide if they want to remain punk or mutate into metal poppers. The guitar bombast of The New America and The Hopeless Housewife sounds like a prelude to a heavy-metal conversion. For these middle-age punks the poppy manifesto of the year 2000 is A World Without Melody, that tries in vain to match the hook of Punk Rock Song and ends up sounding like recycled Nirvana. Making the songs longer (almost all of them about or over three minutes long) forces them to venture into power-pop territory, as if the Smithereens had never existed (the best imitation is perhaps 1000 Memories), or even into jangling pop balladry a` la R.E.M. (Whisper In Time). Ultimately, the hard-rock ballads I Love My Computer and There Will Be A Way could be sung by any of the teen pop idols of the previous decade. There is little to recall the classic sound of Bad Religion, and too many songs are half-baked, which is unusual for them.

The Process of Belief (Epitaph, 2002), with much shorter songs, marked the return of Gurewitz in the ranks and steered clear of the previous album's pop-metal. While there is no masterpiece here, the frantic Supersonic, the relentless Can't Stop It the rowdy You Don't Belong) and the poignant Evangeline evoke the classic sound the way New America could not. However, the tribute to their original hardcore might be overdone: too many songs sound identical (Prove It, Destined For Nothing, The Lie) or inferior imitations (the rant Kyoto Now!). Despite another incursion in the power-pop of the Smithereens (Broken), the superb melodic inspiration of Gray Race remained elusive. However, the solemnly moving anti-war song Sorrow (that opens with a sort of subtle tribute to the Police) and the melodramatic choral singalong Epiphany were moving anthems for the new millennium and together form the emotional centerpiece of the album. If not a moral testament, this was certainly an accomplished work (but not necessarily the most innovative or poignant).

In the time of the Iraqi war, Bad Religion contributed to the anti-Bush campaign with the fiery political concept album The Empire Strikes First (Epitaph, 2004). The collection pivots around powerful albeit unoriginal punches such as Let Them Eat War, Live Again and The Quickening. Best is probably the lightning-speed rant Sinister Rouge, that sounds like the Dead Kennedys gone grindcore. They resurrect the ghost of the Clash in Los Angeles Is Burning, except that they dress it up with one of their poppiest refrains. And they borrow the heavy-metal riff of the L7"s We Pretend for the most anthemic ditty, The Empire Strikes First. Even more anthemic would be the hoedown and singalong Social Suicide if it weren't so brief. Bad Religion try something different with the apocalyptic blues-rock of To Another Abyss, the musical-like merry-go-round of Beyond Electric Dreams, and the slow Queen-style melodrama of Boot Stamping On A Human Face Forever, but these are all beyond their field of competence.

Error (Epitaph, 2004) is the project of Dillinger Escape Plan's vocalist Greg Puciato and Bad Religion's guitarist Brett Gurewitz.

After a hiatus of nine years, Greg Graffin released his second solo album, Cold As The Clay (Anti, 2006), disguised as an ordinary singer-songwriter.

New Maps Of Hell (2007) continued Bad Religion's political campaign with mixed results. On the surface the band has returned to the age of senseless hardcore bullets: Heroes & Martyrs, Germs Of Perfection, Dearly Beloved and the one-minute Murder, peaking with the desperate vision of Fields Of Mars. However, there is more underneath the frenzied tempos: the galopping ominous popcore ballad of New Dark Ages, the rousing pub singalong Requiem For Dissent, the poppy elegy Honest Goodbye, the dejected ode The Grand Delusion, the martial parody Submission Complete, etc. Bad Religion composed another majestic and hummable (but only occasionally anthemic) chronicle of the nation's mood.

The Dissent of Man (2010), on the other hand, was a disappointing attempt at taming their firepower, with only Someone to Believe following in the glorious tradition of their angry young man's anthems.