Smash (The Offspring, 1994)

After playing the connections game the previous week, here we have genuine outlier in the collective. It's not that The Offspring are some kind of obscure band (ha ha), but, as you may have noticed, I don't have a whole heap of punk/hardcore/whatever in the library. Before I forget to mention it though, I did find one tiny link into the fray, through drummer Pete Parada (not on this album), who appeared on a single track on Halford's debut album, Resurrection. So the links are pretty tenuous at best.

A good question is: why do I even have this album? Well, if you're going to have just one Offspring album, this is probably the one. Songs like "Self Esteem" and "Come Out and Play" have worked their way to the foundations of the 1990's music zeitgeist, and I'm pretty sure I inherited this when my sister was purging her CD collection years back. It's still the only album of theirs I own and I credit KROQ for keeping me apprised of their later work, so I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything as long as I own a radio.

Smash was the band's breakthrough album. I'm a little hesitant to say it was their bestselling album, as I think they topped it at least once in the decade to follow. There are two albums before it (never heard them) and lead guitarist Noodles was on the verge of returning to his original career in school custodial work if this album had failed.

As mentioned previously, it did not. Carried largely on three big hit songs, it propelled the band to the front of a crowded scene of Orange County punk. However, after another recent listening, I don't think it was dumb luck. Although there are a number of stock tricks like hidden tracks and short throwaway bits, it's a musically sharp album, with riffs that get stuck in my head more than I care to admit, especially "Genocide" and "Smash" seem to run through my head. I was going to remark that they seemed pretty ska-resistant, but make it far enough into the album and you'll get some of that, a few years prior to telling us all to get a job.

As seems to be the case with so many of these bands (Bad Religion, I'm looking at you), success turned them against their label, Epitaph, and all future releases were major-label. The band seems to have found a pretty comfortable place in their sound for the past twenty years and only minimal lineup issues (the drummer, of course). While good for their sanity, it doesn't make for great tales of explosive band bust-ups, but sometimes that's just the way things work out!