Offspring - Smash

Let's see if we can squeeze in an album while my cheesecake bakes.

Ignition is my favorite Offspring album, but it may or may not have died an unsavory rodent induced death in the cd player in my garage. I still have Smash, though. My friends Chris Isch and Sam Mauer and i used to listen to this and Green Day and other analogous things while we were playing pool, or cruising around Bethany late at night like little hooligans (we're big retired hooligans now, but that's beside the point). Bad Habit is still the official road-rage anthem, as far as i know.

I'm not going to pretend that i care about Offspring past Ixnay On The Hombre (my t-shirt from that concert sadly peeled away into oblivion a couple years ago) but their early stuff is incredible. They deserved to be 1/5 of the 90s punk revival. They don't appear to like LA very much, and i can't say i blame 'em. It sounds like a terrible place. I think i was in one of their airports once or twice but i didn't get brutalized, so i can't really comment.

Sweet Euterpe, what a glorious collection of harmonic vibrations plucked from the universal quantum wave field. I could start an Offspring tribute band tomorrow, that's how engrained in my brain this album is (i dare you to explain the spelling change for the past tense of the verb ingrain; i turns to e because screw it i quit)

Damnit, timer went off. I don't want crunchy cheesecake for breakfast tomorrow. Hold on, be right back...

... ok, i'm back. All 5 bands are important in their own way, but Smash was the first Gold record for Epitaph, now quintuple platinum or some ridiculous figure (i probably accounted for three of them because i've dropped a lot of CDs in my time on this planet), so it's undeniably praiseworthy. Not bad for a bleach-headed microbiologist in training (he finished his PhD in 2017). You may or may not know that quite a few of us punks are highly educated, with advanced degrees in something or other (too bad i didn't have platinum selling album royalties to pay for finishing mine, har har).

Smash didn't make an impression for it's family friendly lullaby ballads. It's loud and fast and the songs are so incredibly scream along pleasing to hear, even for the ten-thousandth time. They recommend a glass of wine, but i've secretly replaced bottle's coca-cola for apple-cherry juice (folgers crystals style), and whaddya know, mikey likes it.

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