A fair few Bad Religion fans name No Control as their favourite album that the band has recorded. Personally I think that the first time you hear Bad Religion you will either love or hate them from that initial punk blast. And they are a punk band, just because they are on and own Epitaph Records doesn’t make them pop punk, they are not NOFX or Lagwagon that’s for sure. Anyway, I digress, whichever record you are listening to at the time of your virgin Bad Religion experience will then become your favourite album of theirs and what usually happens is you will devour and love it to pieces. This is the reason my particular Bad Religion fancy is Recipe For Hate from 1993. So maybe one of the reasons this record gets so much praise is because at this point the band found themselves with a comparatively larger audience than they did in the previous year when they put out (again in my own humble but ultimately spot on opinion) their second greatest recording in the shape of the consistently brilliant Suffer LP. This gem of an album only sold a pitiful 4000 copies at the time whereas 70,000 units were eventually sold of No Control.
This is not to say that No Control a bad record, in fact I would go as far to say that of all the bands extensive catalogue it is this record that I will listen to when I get ready to go out to a show. Its speed is relentless and when the band slow things down to a still pacey half-time chug the next speed fuelled riff is only a minute or so away. There are just too many miss steps compared to stone cold classics on here. Almost all of side two seems a little bit throw away and rushed. That the band wrote most of this on the Suffer tour and recorded it pretty shortly afterwards may have something to do with it. But to include 5 songs that I would consider filler is nuts. Run of the mill cuts such as Billy, Progress and Automatic Man have to appear next to the likes of masterful punk workouts such as Anxiety, You and the perfect I Want to Conquer the World. I think a little more time and the band could have produced a second Classic record on the trot.
Singer Greg Gaffin as well as delivering a faultless vocal performance on the whole album penned the best line on the track No Control itself as well “Questions that besiege us in life are testament of our helplessness”. It’s a great albeit brief observation that sums the record up for me. It simply shows how grounded the band are, how un rock star a group of individuals in a band can be. They know that no matter how clever their sloganeering, no matter how corrupt politics and religion is in America, nothing they can do with Bad Religion will change that. Music can change an individual’s life but whilst the majority of the world do not listen to nor care about messages in popular music a world shift in political and religious thinking is an unrealistic and foolhardy dream. If only Rage Against The Machine believed this they may have never released the disappointing Battle Of Los Angeles. As if just to nail the message home the final song informs us that “The world won’t stop without you” A pessimistic outlook maybe but never has a truism inspired me so much as to try and make at least some kind of difference with my life. Pick up any Bad Religion album and you can read intellectual and of course some not so intellectual yet still positive self-enlightening prose like this without feeling like you are being preached to. They are such a great, great band and whilst they may not change the world I feel that without them I may not have turned out to be the same guy I am today.
lostinrock 