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Title: Good One
Review: Though they were raised in the cradle of Orange County, California, punk, the Offspring are more about songs than attitude. This quartet's sound has as much to do with the crazed, anything-goes novelty of Nuggets-era garage rock from the Sixties as it does with the loud-fast skateboard anthems of the last decade. Half of 1988, this album, salutes mid-Eighties hardcore, and it's a record that any TSOL fan has already heard a million times: pogo-pony polka beats; bass lines that fly on a carpet of eighth notes; zooming, solo-free guitar riffs; and lots of "whoah-ohhh!" sing-along parts. Frontman Dexter Holland rants on about "fragile lives, shattered dreams" on "The Kids Aren't Alright" and, on another track, offers this SoCal extreme-sports manifesto: "Faster now, you know I got no brakes." There's no sense of risk, though -- even the hyperventilating remake of Morris Albert's ... "Feelings" is predictably snide.
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