Bad Religion

In the late '70s, Southern California's cookie-cutter suburbs were a breeding ground for Ramones mania among bored, leather-jacketed misfits, and their response was to create hardcore: a faster, harder, less melodic version of CBGB-era punk. Bad Religion brought braininess to the mix, and its multisyllabic lyrics -- ranging from latchkey-kid autobiography to cautionary political commentary -- resonated on a level that set the quintet apart from its smashmouth peers.

Lacking a record label, the band simply started its own, and Bad Religion and the Epitaph imprint became something of a West Coast counterpart to Washington, D.C.'s Dischord, run by Minor Threat bandmates Ian MacKaye (later in Fugazi) and Jeff Nelson. Epitaph became a hothouse for the '90s pop-punk explosion, nurturing the Offspring, Rancid, NOFX, and Pennywise, among others -- bands who in many cases eclipsed Bad Religion in commercial impact, but all of whom owe their sound and their careers to the pioneering hardcore band's '80s output.

The place all of those pop-punk disciples started is compiled on 80–85, which repackages Bad Religion's debut album and other early recordings. It's the quintessential L.A. hardcore primer, an unrefined but exciting mix of compressed musical fury (two-minute or shorter screeds) and angry-nerd lyrics by singer and future biology Ph.D. Greg Graffin, then only in his teens. But the band struggled for years to take the next step. Into the Unknown -- conspicuously excluded from 80–85 -- remains the black sheep of the back catalogue, a head-scratching 180-degree turn toward '70s keyboard pop that essentially broke up the band for a few years.

On Suffer, the reunited Bad Religion distills its essence to 15 blast-furnace songs in under 30 minutes; the melodies build to anthemic choruses and then crash abruptly. No Control refines the formula and Against the Grain perfects it, beefing up the multipart harmonies and achieving a howling clarity. It's the band's mid-career peak, a manifesto on the price of modernization that presages the premillennial hand-wringing heard in countless rock albums a decade later.

Subsequent releases struggle to live up to that standard, and on Recipe for Hate the band invited a bevy of admirers (Eddie Vedder among them) to vary the increasingly predictable arrangements. The great leap forward finally arrived with Andy Wallace, hired as the band's first outside producer, who brought a blue-flame clarity to Stranger than Fiction. Suddenly the band's songs lunged at the listener with a previously unheard fist-meets-face ferocity, drummer Bobby Schayer proved he could do more than deliver a punk polka beat, and the compact melodies soared, particularly the title song and a sharp remake of "21st Century (Digital Boy)" (originally heard on Suffer). Both of the latter tunes were written by guitarist Brett Gurewitz, and his departure from the band after the release of Stranger than Fiction coincided with its demise as a creative force. Graffin's pseudophilosophical lyrics sounded clumsy without Gurewitz's melodies to offset them, and the shared songwriting of No Substance and celebrity producers on The Gray Race (Ric Ocasek) and The New America (Todd Rundgren) did little to pull the band out its rut. Gurewitz's return for The Process of Belief and The Empire Strikes First restored the balance, and though they broke no ground, the discs were easily the band's strongest releases in a decade. (GREG KOT)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide