Review Summary: Make it all right.
It’s funny looking back on it now, because
Let the Bad Times Roll really was an unmitigated disaster by every metric imaginable. For a record that took eleven years to materialise, it was outrageously poor considering it was coming from a band of The Offspring’s venerable stature. Sure, their output post-new-millennium has been a little tepid, but up until 2021 they’d never released anything as ugly as
Let the Bad Times Roll. This, of course, was down to a record in development hell – from failed promises of its release, original members being fired, lawsuits, and a bizarrely undercooked batch of tracks with one of the worst productions I’ve heard in modern memory,
Let the Bad Times Roll encapsulated this aura of pandemonium furtively going on behind the scenes. However, now that things have settled in the band’s camp, The Offspring are attempting to palate cleanse the acrid taste in everyone’s mouth by having another crack at it. What have they used to cleanse everyone’s mush? Well, if the singles were anything to go by, they had the good intentions of reaching for the bottle of Sierra Springs, but accidentally picked up bleach instead. “Light it Up” was a very solid, albeit paint-by-numbers track that captured the essence of their heyday well, but the awful “Make it All Right” with its cringe-induced choruses and generally flaccid songwriting disseminated warning flags. Yet, even with this blunder, “Come to Brazil” is the real stinker; a corny concept of ‘What if Metallica were a pop punk band?’ The idea is harmless, sure, but the execution is filled with incoherent structures and contrasting moods that throw caution to the wind. Couple that with
Supercharged’s artwork aping one of their most iconic albums,
Smash, with Metallica’s
Ride the Lightning and it’s no surprise “Come to Brazil” turned out the way it did.
Fortunately for fans, the promotion for
Supercharged is one similar to
Days Go By, in that the band have a penchant for picking the worst tracks possible to promote their new record. No,
Supercharged isn’t the same kind of monstrosity as
Let the Bad Times Roll, and surprisingly it offers a lot of great things I didn’t think the band were capable of doing at this point. As a massive proponent of mid-nineties-early-noughties The Offspring, “Hanging by a Thread”, “Light it Up”, “The Fall Guy” and “Truth in Fiction” all capture their full-throttle punk sound and have strong hooks to back them up. They don’t break the mould, and they won’t change the mind of anyone who didn’t like The Offspring to begin with, but they competently hearken back to that iconic era and make it all exciting to listen to in the process. The production is, for the most part, galaxies away from the abominable
Let the Bad Times Roll – which sounded like it was recorded inside a fridge – showing some semblance of dynamics and embodying the band’s signature style overall, and at just over thirty minutes, the record doesn’t meander or waste your time, dodgy tracks and all.
Overall,
Supercharged is a huge improvement that actually addresses most of the issues with
Let the Bad Times Roll, however, it’s far from being a return to form. Four of the ten songs are excellent, three have potential, and the other three are just outright poorly written. “Looking Out For #1”, “Get Some”, and album closer “You Can’t Get There From Here” have glimmers of good moments in them, but ultimately, they lack the consistency to make them worthwhile. “Looking Out For #1” next to “Light it Up” was also extremely disorientating to listen to because the hook to the opener and the introduction to “Light it Up” are so recycled, initially, I thought I was listening to the same song. These three tracks feel like weird compromises on their MO mixed with an insatiable yearning for experimenting with styles that don’t work well together. “Get Some” is the worst of the three – a weird rock ‘n’ roll styled jam with Dexter doing some odd vocal ideas – but even with “Looking Out For #1” and “You Can’t Get There From Here” having more traditional The Offspring fidelity to them, the songs lack any individualistic charm or panache to make them stand out. Couple that with “Come to Brazil”, “Ok, But This is the Last Time” and “Make it All Right” for being either terribly reliant on modern day pop punk tropes, or just badly implementing styles that don’t work well together, and the album is a rocky road to jam from start to finish.
Supercharged is a surprisingly decent, albeit flawed record. There are elements of greatness at the heart of it, but the problems soon arise when The Offspring attempt to veer away from their wheelhouse of driving riffs and infectious hooks. With a little bit of tightening up, “Looking Out for #1”, “Get Some” and “You Can’t Get There From Here” could have been great songs, but unfortunately, they fall prey to sloppy execution and/or dull ideas. To bounce back from 2021’s misfire is great, but they’ve still carried over a couple of pernicious habits that bog
Supercharged down to being an okay album, when it should have been a great one.
