via//chicago

np: "Losing Generation" - Bad Religion

Last April Epitaph Records decided it was time to give a much needed update to the awesome Bad Religion back catalog by remastering and reissuing the band's early albums, which I personally appreciated for the new Suffer alone. However there was one album that somehow didn't make it into this round of remasters. In fact this particular album has been out of print since shortly after its initial pressing and there certainly don't seem to be any plans to rectify this situation any time soon. The album I'm speaking of is the "lost" (read: conveniently forgotten) early Bad Religion effort Into The Unknown, the follow-up to the landmark 1982 debut How Could Hell Be Any Worse. Why is such a pivotal part of Bad Religion's early development virtually unavailable and unknown to even many of their own fans? I'm guessing it has a lot to do with the synths. Rather than push the faster/harder/louder approach to punk rock that many of their Southern California hardcore peers were milking in those years, the band decided to take things in a different direction - into the unknown, if you will. And apparently in Brett Gurewitz and Greg Graffin's world the "unknown" is a place where punk rock not-so-magically collides with the world of synth-heavy corporate rock ala Journey and Van Halen. Sound pretty awful? It is, for the most part anyway. There are a couple of moments when the band actually sounds like they might be trying something new, but for the most part it sounds like they woke up one morning filed in the wrong genre and decided to give it a go anyway. Little surprise that the album was widely trashed and quickly "forgotten" by nearly everyone involved with the band. But don't just take my word for it - click on the link above and listen to "Losing Generation", a fairly representative track, for yourself (that file is a vinyl rip, so don't expect crystal clear sound). One could easily argue in favor of this album by saying that the band couldn't get much more punk rock than pissing off thousands of fans with half-hearted synth-pop, but I think that would be giving them a little too much credit. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the band and they rebounded very well from this mis-step and created some downright essential 80's punk rock, but I don't like it when any bands go to lengths to bury parts of their recorded pasts. Into the Unknown certainly isn't a great album by any means, but there are some worthwhile moments and I think it deserves to be heard by fans and other interested students of 80's punk rock - if only to get a peek at another side of the band or to get a taste of the way the decade could have gone. Hell, maybe a quality remastering job would reveal some new depths and layers to this album and pave the way to a widespread critical re-evaluation of it - but I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.

(Thanks to Strange Reaction for bringing this album back to my attention, without stumbling across that site I may have also forgotten about this one completely. Try here to get more tracks from Into The Unknown.)