Surely someone else here must have bought the Offspring - Smash purely on the basis it was on constant rotation on the Metal Show for years? Anyone? And yes, it was shite.

Quote from: John Kimble on April 28, 2020, 12:55:37 PM
Surely someone else here must have bought the Offspring - Smash purely on the basis it was on constant rotation on the Metal Show for years? Anyone? And yes, it was shite.

Coupla great tracks on that album. But by and large a fairly shite band.

Some albums were more or less played in full because they were in the top 10 for so long,happy days! have the cassett player ready to record!

Quote from: John Kimble on April 28, 2020, 12:55:37 PM
Surely someone else here must have bought the Offspring - Smash purely on the basis it was on constant rotation on the Metal Show for years? Anyone? And yes, it was shite.
That was the first album I ever bought when I was about 8 or 9! Have to say though I still love a lot of that mid 90s stuff like Offspring, Nofx, Bad Religion, Vandals...

G/Z/R were scutter.  I loved Demanufacture so I was interested in hearing it but I remember it being fairly shite.  I wonder how bad it must really have been to hit the low bar of my thirteen year old shit detector  :laugh:


Quote from: Eoin McLove on April 28, 2020, 01:51:54 PM
Smash is a great album.

Dead right it is. Gave it a spin a few weeks back.

I still have that G//Z/R album somewhere, it was poor alright. Can't stand any of that pop punk shite either, can't understand how it got so popular. Not quite the same thing but I liked the first Transplants album at the time.

I think the way it is with a lot of albums from our teenage years is that if we liked it a lot then we end up with a soft spot for it now, but if it was to come out tomorrow we wouldn't bother our holes with it. It's hard to be fully subjective with a lot of it. For me anyway. I never really buzzed hard off Smash so it's unlikely I'd waste my time trying now but at the same time I'd throw on the first Korn album every couple of years and enjoy a lot of it.

And by the way the G/Z/R album was really fucking bad.

Smash, Ignition and Ixnay on the Hombre are all great, catchy records.

Quote from: astfgyl on April 28, 2020, 03:28:13 PM
I think the way it is with a lot of albums from our teenage years is that if we liked it a lot then we end up with a soft spot for it now, but if it was to come out tomorrow we wouldn't bother our holes with it. It's hard to be fully subjective with a lot of it. For me anyway. I never really buzzed hard off Smash so it's unlikely I'd waste my time trying now but at the same time I'd throw on the first Korn album every couple of years and enjoy a lot of it.

And by the way the G/Z/R album was really fucking bad.
When you're listening to them you're also getting a nostalgic buzz of what they meant to you back then. You get the little emotional kick too along with the music itself. They're part of the story of your life. This is why people frequently don't "get" some of the shite we used to listen to when presented with it in contemporary times, they're just hearing the music and not the warm glow of a youthful nostalgie trip.

The Offspring's 90s work is peerless. The records they put out in that decade are some of my favourite punk albums full stop. Great songwriting and a real edge to the material, they really managed to get a feel for the underbelly of California. It's kind of wrong to group them with Green Day and other bands,they always had far more of an edge.

Their songwriting totally went downhill after Americana, though, and their work since then has been really mundane.

The only song I know of theirs is Pretty Fly for a White Guy so I always thought they were a parody/comedy band tbh.

I've never been a fan of pop punk though.

The first Offspring album is pretty formative, but it's got a hard edge and it's pretty political in places. Ignition is amazing, some really dark songs on it. Smash still has a hard edge, it's hooky as fuck but there's plenty of dirty riffs on it. All three were produced by Thom Wilson too (Dead Kennedy's, TSOL, Christian Death).

Inxnay on the Hombre was produced by Dave Jerden, sounds much more polished - but not more than any of his other big records. Songwriting is still there but the pop is definitely creeping in by now. Bizarrely, Jello Biafra shows up on this record to do a piss-take interlude.

Are they even together these days? I know Dexter Holland went back and finished his PhD in molecular biology a few years ago. For a lad that has enough money to last several lifetimes, fair dues to him going back, think he was working in research towards a cure for HIV.