Out Of The Vaults #5- Bad Religion - No Control

Each week or so I will ask my wife to dive deep into our CD cabinets (The Vaults) and pull out a random CD. The chosen album will then be given to me and I will  "muse" on the disc for awhile in this blog no matter how good, bad, or embarrassing the chosen disc is. Where did I buy it, how old was I, first reaction to hearing the album, do I still listen to it today and anywhere else my stream of conscious will take me in regards to the "Out Of The Vaults" weekly pick.

Out of the Vaults #5 - Bad Religion - No Control

Bad Religion had a string of 4 unbelievable punk rock albums. Suffer (1988), No Control (1989), the album which brought the then17 year old me to the band Against the Grain (1990) and Generator (1992). Their debut album How Could Hell Be Any Worse (1981) was a good punk record but the band was very young and not quite there yet. I won't even get into the attempted prog rock of Into The Unknown (1983) . Recipe For Hate, the album following the four great ones,  is 50/50. All the bands material after Recipe For Hate, with the exception of a few songs here and there sound forced. The same formula without the same feeling.

Even though those four albums are all great fast punk records , No Control gets a little bit of a boost over the others because it doesnt let up. The first six songs come at you like a high speed freight train. There isn’t a chance to catch your breath until it reaches Track 7 "Sanity". Most Bad Religion album will consist of a few of these slower paced songs but on No Control, "Sanity" is it. At the beginning of Track 11 “Progress", you think you are going to receive another chance to catch your breath but the band is not having it. Twenty seconds into "Progress" the music once again kicks into overdrive and continues straight through the final four songs or the album.

One of the signature traits of Bad Religion, besides their great "Oohs" and "Ahs" is the expansive vocabulary of Cornell University Ph.D. Bad Religion singer Greg Graffin. Beginning with Suffer every Bad Religion album is chock full of very scholarly colorful words. With lyrics like “Culture is the seed of proliferation but it has gotten into a inharmonic whole” (Track 3 “No Control”), “He’s quintessential, mindless, modern, epicene” (Track 5 “Automatic Man”), “Is your fecundity  a trammel or a treasure” (Track 6 “I Want To Conquer The World”), “To insure your likely metamorphosis into this reprobate” (Track 8 “Henchmen”) and “An elements in a sea or enthapic organic compounds”, “A piece or chaos related phylogenetically”( Both in Track 15 “The World Won't Stop”), No Control is no exception. 

Whenever I would pick up a new Bad Religion album from the local record store I would always make sure to stop at the bookstore next door to pick up a pocket dictionary. Too paraphrase the Bruce Springsteen song “No Surrender”, we learned more vocabulary in a two minute Bad Religion song then we ever learned at school.