Stranger Than Fiction

BAD RELIGION: “Stranger Than Fiction” (Dragnet/ Sony)

On first listen, this album sounds like just another day at the studio for these high priests of West Coast grunge, allowing them the opportunity to flex their finger muscles and torture their tonsils . . . and not much else.

But a closer look at the lyric sheet reveals that there’s more to Bad Religion than meets the ears. Guitarist Brett Gurewitz and vocalist Greg Graffin share the songwriting credits and there can be no doubt that their penned pearls of wisdom are 360 university degrees celsius more thought-provoking than the average scatterbrained scrawl that some inflict on us.

Out of 17 tracks there’s not one dumb love song but, rather, you get their ponderous musings on the negative effects of television, the price of, er, individuality in an increasingly conformist society and a series of philosophical side voyages (ha) that see Messrs. Gurewitz and Graffin on a fear and loathing binge of the past, present and, why not, the future thrown in for good measure.

For the most part, it’s Gurewitz who has the edge lyrically with some sporadically brilliant lines, as on “Hooray For Me”:

“I can see my teenage father standing/Straight on a desolate corner/In the shadow of tentacled towers by the red light of America/I imagine how his mother felt when she heard that her husband was dying/ . . . And a song came on my radio like a cemetery rhyme/ For a million crying corpses in their tragedy of respectable existence.”

There’s a disarming honesty in some of these lines which can catch you off guard. It’s certainly not what you would expect to hear from your standard two-and-a-half minute grunge ditty.

However, the lyrics are delivered at such breakneck speed that you can’t actually hear what they’re singing – without the lyric sheet you would be literally lost for words.

But my main reservation is that it’s completely unimaginative musically; it’s just a business-as-usual grunge workout with nay a whiff of the subtlety. Now, I’m not exactly a fully paid-up member of the Dire Straits Society for the Extension of Guitar Solos (though I have been known to pay the odd subscription to Neil Young) but there’s practically no variety or development in the song structure here at all. If they had borrowed a leaf or two from the Kurt Cobain songbook, they could have been contenders (and given that Stranger Than Fiction is produced by Nirvana sound guru Andy Wallace, it’s surprising that they didn’t do so).

As it is, we’re left wondering at what might have been had they a decent tunesmith in their ranks.

• Nicholas G Kelly