Welp, it’s that time of year again. The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, people are letting loose in the summer air, and you need to have a serious talk about your friend Greg’s troubling habits. No one likes an intervention, so you might be thinking of crafting a perfect playlist to help lighten the mood before getting down to the serious task at hand. You know NOFX is fun, and you also know that Fat Mike is a pretty vulnerable songwriter who has been to rehab multiple times. Before you start adding the band’s songs to the queue, here are twenty that you should maybe consider skipping.
“Drugs Are Good”
This one’s pretty much a given. You’re all gathered at your apartment to talk to your friend Greg about how, in his case at least, drugs are very NOT good. We can’t reiterate enough here that when he does drugs, people definitely do not think that he is cool.
“Kids of the K-Hole”
You’re planning on slipping all of Greg’s ketamine out of his jacket pocket when you offer to hang it up for him at what he thinks is just a normal get together among friends. Probably best to hold off on playing a song that references the drug multiple times, lest he direct his ire with the situation onto you.
“Drug Free America”
You might be thinking to yourself, ‘Oh great! A song promoting clean living and embracing sobriety as a nation!’ We hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but the song is actually about how all drugs should, in fact, be free, which is a sentiment Greg certainly agrees with.
“You Drink, You Drive, You Spill”
Unfortunately, Greg just got his second DUI, which is the entire reason you planned this intervention to begin with. We normally love a song that makes light of drunk driving. Especially if it spends most of its runtime suggesting the biggest risk it imposes is a spilled cocktail. Still, there’s a time and a place, and this function is neither.
“Quart In Session”
Everybody loves a good pun, but Greg literally has a court date this month related to an act of arson he has no memory of committing. Witnesses said it was pretty sick, but that’s irrelevant right now. The time for jokes is sadly over, as well as any potential for rebuilding the charred White Castle on Broad St. Also, it goes without saying that a track that talks about how boring sobriety can be is not the most appropriate given the current situation.
“Pump Up The Valuum”
We’ve always suspected that Greg’s Valium problem was a direct result of his leg injury last summer, which may have happened when he drank a 30 pack and tried to do a backflip off of his neighbor’s garage. You might be wanting to play this one to prove a point about the dangers of Diazepam abuse, but it’s best to at least pick a song where the writers aren’t so zooted they can’t spell the name of the drug correctly in the title.
“I Am An Alcoholic”
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem in the first place. We all know Greg is a bit hard-headed, as evidenced by multiple inebriated concussions he has suffered. You’d be forgiven for wanting to speed the process along. Still, no matter how hard you try to make it so, this song will not serve as an admission of alcohol abuse unless Greg decides to add it to the queue himself.
“First Call”
This is a song about going to a bar as soon as it opens to be the first person there that gets shit faced. It also talks about essentially drinking 24/7 with pride. Needless to say, this is not the message we’re all trying to send to a guy who recently got banned from your favorite bar for camping out in the parking lot after closing time.
“Whoops, I OD’d”
Wow, who sucked all the fun out of this incredibly serious and hopefully life-saving intervention? That’s what your friends will be asking when this depressing as fuck song written from the perspective of an overdose victim starts trickling out of your BlueTooth speaker. Obviously the themes of the song are exactly what you’re trying to prevent, but even Greg will feel it’s a bit too on the nose.
“Pharmacist’s Daughter”
Chances are, one of the reasons this intervention is taking place is to reduce the chances of Greg getting into even more trouble. Because of this, it’s probably not a great idea to clue him in on one of the oldest scams in the book. Greg’s dating history as of late has been rocky at best, so even planting the suggestion that he can date a pharmacist or their daughter to score more Oxy is obviously not going to lead down the best path.
P!ATD swan song 2022 LP “Viva Las Vengeance” caused the band to let the light go out like a sad clown having make-up sex in the middle of a breakup. Say that sentence out loud all by yourself. Long live punishment! While we wish that this wasn’t the band’s final album statement, we have no doubt that a comeback LP will hit the streets in 2032 just in time for Donald Trump Jr.’s snowy white and hopefully laughably unsuccessful Presidential campaign. Also, we don’t think that this record will hold up in about ten years, but stranger things have happened: Because of government-issued sites like Tik-Tok and Parlor, affirmative may be justified and the glorious Creed is bigger now than ever.
Despite the fact that 2018’s “Pray for the Wicked” contains their highest charting and rabidly infectious single “High Hopes,” with notes so jaw-dropping off the deep end it hurts our vocal register without even singing, this pop AF record just isn’t as consistent as the five that came before it. Maybe looser-fitting JNCO jeans and a lower number of co-writers may have made this acrobatic effort a tad more listenable, but what the hell do we know? This album likely bought Brendon the island from the cleverly named Scarlett Johansson 2005 film “The Island.”
While this 2013 effort contains without question P!ATD’s worst record title and actual album cover, it is definitely the first LP mentioned here to flow seamlessly and effortlessly through all of its tracks from song 1-10. Don’t judge a book by its cover and don’t judge things in general unless you are assigned a casual affair in the form of an album ranking article! Anyway, the band was very smart in making a ten-song release sans saturated fats and liquid nitrogen at just under thirty-three minutes for the short attention span theater known as our world, and would you like some jello? Back to the girl that you love: Next to the next album to be mentioned, this one has their second-best album song opener, “This Is Gospel,” which was luckily not locked away in permanent slumber. Oh woah-oh.
After the yet-to-be-mentioned-and-yet-to-offend-in-its-dumb-dumb-slot-here sophomore LP “Pretty. Odd.,” P!ATD created their third LP that exemplified more of a back-to-basics debut album vibe called “Vices & Virtues,” and whilst doing so triumphantly reclaimed its exclamation point to a hurricane of memories. Like entry number five above, this is another ten-track banger and a consistent and underrated one at that. Produced by the Freak of the Week Butch Walker of Marvelous 3, and John “Superman” Feldmann of Goldfinger, this record will make you singalong in your car like you’re 17 again, and it reintroduced the band to a completely new audience, especially when its second single “Ready to Go (Get Me Out of My Mind)” was featured in the ending credits of “The Smurfs,” proving that you hate us cause you ain’t us. Get that bag, Urie.
FYI: This album would’ve been ranked number one on this perfect list if track four, the band’s most superior single “Emperor’s New Clothes,” replaced tracks 1-3 and 5-11 and became an eleven-track repetitive yet lavish mansion of brilliance; it both feels good AND tastes good. However, the band fucked up royally by not doing so, and thus its two Ryan Ross records shine brighter here; if you can’t stop shaking, lean back. Still, the other ten songs on this record are a healthy combination of crazy and genius, and from a songwriting standpoint, 2016’s “Death of a Bachelor” combines Queen, Frank Sinatra, The B-52s, a post-Bachelor Party toilet bowl conference, and more in a very respectable fashion. It’s a hell of a feeling though, it’s a hell of a feeling though; oozin’ aahs.
You know this one. You love this one. We’re wrong about the placement of this one. This is their first album, making it record number one. This one’s biggest single WON MTV’s “Video Of The Year” at the 2006 VMAs to the surprise of just about everyONE. One song on this album is called “London BeckONEd Songs About mONEy Written By Machines” and another one is called “There’s A Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered hONEy, You Just Haven’t Thought of It Yet,” so let’s end this piece with entry number one. One singular sensation.
P is for “Panic,” “Pretty (Odd),” “Pas de Cheval,” and “polarizing,” so imagine the band dropped acid given to them by Bob Dylan backstage at a Boys Like Girls Royal Variety Performance, listened to “Rubber Soul” over and over 1965 times, commandeered strange and dated clothes from your creepy uncle, and you’ve got the band’s grower-but-not-a-shower 2008 LP “Pretty. Odd.” Like we alluded to above, main songwriter Ryan Ross left after this one along with the band’s exclamation point, but we still think if their third record “Vices & Virtues” flip-flopped its release dates with this sophomore LP, the Ross-Urie-feeling-as-good-lovers-can duo would still be flopping around together mad as rabbits. And everybody gets there, everybody gets their and everybody gets their way.
Pearl Jam has a tendency to open their live shows with a softer song, which is a terrible thing to do. Even worse is to open a rock album with a song like “Sometimes,” a melancholy ode to some times. By the time “Hail, Hail” gets the party started you’ve probably gone home, and the record doesn’t ever bother to invite you back.
“Gigaton” is a Pearl Jam album the same way that Papa John’s is pizza – it technically is, but it sure as goddamn hell is not. Maybe that’s not fair, maybe having “Even Flow” floating in your head for most of your life causes a bias. You can’t fault them for seeming a little more somber in 2020, and Eddie Vedder sounds less like an Adam Sandler character than ever, but it would be easier to fuck to “Wind Beneath My Wings” than anything here.
There’s a running gag in “This is Spinal Tap” where the band just keeps losing drummers, which was reportedly based on Pearl Jam’s real-life percussionist problems. Their fifth and apparently still-functioning drummer joined in 1998, and he’s a dead ringer for Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron. Shame that his first album with the band isn’t a dead ringer for “Badmotorfinger.”
There are many awesome things going on at this very moment within the cells of your body. The nucleus is protecting your personal DNA info, lysosomes are repairing and digesting, ribosomes are making proteins. None of this would be possible without an energy source – the mitochondria that contain, pound-for-pound, the same amount of energy as a bolt of lightning! There’s also a lot of goopy cytoplasm sitting around doing fucking nothing.
If you’re going to make a visual statement, your instinct is to go big. Lead single “Life Wasted” marks the return of Pearl Jam to the MTV world, and the resulting video is grosser than Tool’s old stop-motion disgustoramas. Seeing the band’s dismembered heads covered in ants or invaded by snakes or consumed in flames is much easier to take if you pretend they’re all human traffickers or terrorists or your landlord.
Pearl Jam have reacted to loss and tragedy admirably, and they’ve had to face more than their fair share. The bursts of anger and love are welcome and appreciated, but these are five men at their sexual peak – they shouldn’t be lamenting or wailing, they should be singing about love in elevators and shaking someone all night long. In a perfect world, Pearl Jam would fucking suck.
Post-Bush and pre-joyless hellhole full of Nazis, this could be the happiest Pearl Jam has ever sounded. Of course, there’s got to be a line in A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood stories which is the happiest Eeyore ever sounded. Framed that way, happiness doesn’t really mean anything, does it? Let’s just enjoy the brief burst of sun as PJ fully let out their inner Who for the first time.
If you attended a public high school in 1992, you remember the unspoken but highly enforced rule that at least 30% of the student body must be wearing the Pearl Jam “Alive” t-shirt at all times. This particular album isn’t really what Pearl Jam sound like, and shows off hardly any of the range that will become a signature – those aren’t surprising notes for a band in its infancy – what’s surprising are the songs, massive songs that moved the earth.
Funny how the untold number of Pearl Jam imitators always seemed to stop at “Ten.”
This is the band firing on all cylinders, and the fact that the cylinders are misshapen, rusted, cracking – that just makes it better, man. You won’t find better loud Pearl Jam than “Spin the Black Circle” or better quiet Pearl Jam than “Nothingman.” Producer Brendan O’Brien, who has spent more time with the band than most of their drummers, says that recording “Vitalogy” was tense. If tense sessions deliver albums like this, we urge each member of Pearl Jam to drop what they’re doing and start texting each others’ wives.
Stock and stone, blood and bone. If “Vitalogy” was made of firing cylinders, what we have here is made of the very mountains and gorges from which the metal was mined. “Yield” is a physical experience, like a triathlon, only it’s better to start this with two drinks or an edible inside you. It also makes you feel like there’s a villain to defeat at the end. Maybe triathlons should end with mortal combat, to really separate the strong from the weak. It’s evolution, baby.
If you’re a fan of both the punk and un-punk sensibilities of Warped Tour and the pop vocal stylings of The Ting Tings, check out this twelve-track 2015 LP from the accurately and robustly named Beautiful Bodies. If not, the gone, gone, gone defunct band has an actual Harvard Law School professor that will literally school your lies and the war inside your heart. How many Harvard students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? You narcissists should know the answer to that one! Back to “Battles,” Beautiful Bodies released only one album that you likely missed due to repeated screenings of another 2015 competitor release known as “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2,” so capture, release, and stream the record now.
Unlike the band mentioned above, Greensboro, North Carolina’s Farewell released a total of two LPs, both of which unsuccessfully fed the fire of the world via Epitaph Records. The first of these, 2007’s “Isn’t This Supposed to be Fun?!” is a solid and successfully fun power-pop banger, and yes, we just said “banger”; sing, baby. We’re not sure why this album with a literally questionable album title didn’t resonate with the mainstream, but we posit, and yes, we just said “posit,” that its lack of mainstream attention was all about its poor timing: The record was a paradoxical combination of a tad too late AND a bit too early. If you wanted to, you could just start it up.
Remember the thankfully short and not-so-sweet dance wave during the late aughts that infiltrated the scene? Well we sure do, and our bright obnoxiously cringe neon clothes with kiddie monsters on ‘em now sit on the floor of someone else’s closet. We digress. This sincerely good 2007 album from Las Vegas’ The Higher unquestionably tops this awful trend’s list, while a bunch of schlocky uninspired shitbag toe-slamming-and-not-toe-tapping albums are dormantly buried below its fire’s dust. One might even say that it is (wait for it, wait for it) in fact much, much “lower.” Zing!
We know, we know: You hate the mix on this one, and you’re the primary authority on the painstaking process of optimizing and combining multi-track recordings. Blame us for that gaffe as said mix was our idea. Anyway, letlive’s third album “The Blackest Beautiful” was poised to assist in helping the incomparable band climb to the 21st-century aggressive music heights reached by platinum-selling post-hardcore peers The Used and Story of the Year, but that misguided thought is now a dreamer’s disease. Sadly the band broke up shortly after this album’s also underrated 2016 follow-up “If I’m The Devil…”. Whack. Preventdeath.
Now we’re at the two-part section of this article where the word “match” is prominently featured at the beginning of said band’s name, and that fact is going to make the forever unwell Matchbox Twenty seriously reconsider their not-so-smooth life choices. The Matches may be the real “one that got away” group mentioned here, as pretty much every label on earth tried to sign them, and they should’ve been huge AF, but it just didn’t happen for the four-piece, at least that’s what Katie said. Alas, the enigmatic group definitely didn’t recoup the label’s expansive budget, especially given the fact that SO many notable producers worked on the record, and “Decomposer” went far from platinum. Still, we love, love, love this album and truly revel in the fact that the band mentions the best social networking site “MySpace” in its quirky and fun single “Papercut Skins”. PUT SOME RESPECT ON TOM ANDERSON’S NAME!
Sometimes bands ahead of the curve fail to cash in on their eventual strong sonic influence. You may debate endlessly on whether or not Poughkeepsie is actually a part of Upstate New York, but there is no argument as to whether or not the band got a fair shake. Spoiler alert: They didn’t. Despite the group’s most superior single (and we aren’t taking any more questions on the matter) “Monsters” ending up streaming quite well after the fact, Matchbook (Chemical) Romance’s sophomore and final LP “Voices” didn’t get as much initial praise as it should’ve when it first came out, and the four-piece hung their hats just one year after the album was released. What a sight. The record was quite a departure for the band, but they certainly didn’t anticipate that it would cause an actual departure; woah. Believe in what you see, yeah.
First of all, why the hell does this band NOT have a Wikipedia page? Come on, dorks! Do your worst! Our step-cousin’s forever out-of-tune Menzingers cover band in Butte, Montana even has one! Nothing feels good anymore. Regarding the act’s actual music which is even better experienced live and in-person: Whittier (yes, Whittier), California’s pride and joy Plague Vendor made a hell of a sweaty garage rock album for your punk rock heads, and easily has the best and most universal album title on this sterling list of ten; who doesn’t like things that are free to eat? In closing, we love it when a band has a song named after its own band name. Respect.
Fans of ‘90s-grunge and the modern act that hearkens to that era known as Microwave should’ve flocked together and made plans to make Save Face huge, but despite this album meaning “thank you” in French, they just didn’t. No thank you. Bad. Still, this fourteen-song collection consisting of one-word titles from New Jersey’s Save Face deserves an abundance of public and private love, as it is filler and cavity free. Also, it’s very, very, very clever that an album called “Merci” has a song called “Mercy”. We see you, Save Face. Have merci beaucoup.
While we don’t have access to all of the nuts and bolts of Epitaph’s ledgers, we assume that this entry is the largest or among the closest to it in terms of actual record sales to be listed here. However, San Francisco’s Set Your Goals sadly walked so another polarizing NorCal band known as The Story So Far could run, and that a Philadelphia-based uber-literate act known as The Wonder Years could age gracefully album after album; we theorize that it was Set Your Goals’ meh and final follow-up LP to this one known as 2011’s “Burning at Both Ends” that did ‘em in, but that will be touched upon in our upcoming book “Suck It: Flawed Methods of Persecution & Punishment”. Sorry. Anyway, the band had a unique and diverse dual lead singer sound, and this undeniably is one of the best pop-punk albums to be released this century. That’s not a joke, but the word “easycore” sure is. What the hell is a gigawatt? Look closer.
We’re going to close this piece with a downer, but it would be quite an upper for us, the band, and the label if you listened to all of Too Close To Touch’s 2016 LP “Haven’t Been Myself” right now. We’ll pause. Did you make it through all forty-three minutes and twenty-one seconds of this incredible record? Don’t lie! Back to the written word, Lexington, Kentucky’s Too Close To Touch released the one of the most gut-wrenching songs in recent memory as this album’s closer known as “Eiley,” and said tune and the particular lyric “take me instead” are both even more poignant and tear-jerking given lead singer Keaton Pearce’s untimely death at 31 last year. What a shame; miss your face. Keaton’s legacy will forever live on through music.