![]() Because of this album, I knew Oakland, San Francisco, and Campbell before stepping foot in any of those cities. ![]() The album has also inadvertently become an ode to a Bay Area that can no longer exist. Suffice it to say, Rancid’s music isn’t the same as, say, Social Distortion’s general meat-and-potatoes songs about being down on your luck or Green Day’s tales of being a frustrated teen the stories on Wolves are specific, imbued with a verité that’s almost too earnest for comfort, like finding pages torn out from a diary or a faded Polaroid. Until that point, the band built their career on earnest tales of street life, urban blight and hard times-all of which I have to believe are authentic given Armstrong’s documented troubles with alcohol after his time playing in the hugely influential ska-punk band Operation Ivy. ![]() This brand of grimumentary wasn’t new for Rancid. You’re like a good friend, come and see me again.” It’s also easy to miss the horrors documented on “As Wicked” (dead junkies on the pavement, homeless five-years-olds, an old man who moves like “a dying machine”) because it’s so catchy. By the chorus, we know that this downtroddenness goes hand-in-hand with everyday living: “ Good morning, heartache. Or take “Old Friend,” which opens up with the line, “ Look up, you’re in Cleveland again.” Armstrong’s distinct growl has the disgruntled weariness of an untethered wanderer who will never make it home. This explains how singer Tim Armstrong could write an upbeat hit like “Ruby Soho” that begins with the solemn image of a man sitting alone while a party’s raging next door. It’s a feeling so lived-in that it’s barely acknowledged. Tacit sadness permeates Wolves, seething under most moments of triumph. It’s a quality that’s easy to forget due to the fact that the band helped usher in third wave ska with their massive hit “Time Bomb” and the accompanying images of rude boy punks skanking with mohawks and wallet chains. No track is wasted.īut what a lot of people ignore is just how goddamn sad the album is. In terms of scope, cohesion and delivery (and because the band could never escape the Clash comparisons) this is the band’s London Calling. Without a doubt, Wolves is Rancid’s best album, easily earning its place among the greatest punk albums of all time. Following along with lyrics to songs like “Olympia WA” and its mention of “ cars passing by, but none of them seem to go my way” felt relatable in ways that I wouldn’t fully understand until a few years later. While my peers were still playing sports and sectioning themselves off into the preteen friend groups that precluded cliques, I was developing a preference for reading and being alone. I could recognize Rancid as outsiders during a time when I was beginning to feel like an outsider, myself. How could such scary-looking guys with mohawks and neck tats produce something so heartfelt? Beyond repulsion, however, there was attraction. The first time I saw the video for “Ruby Soho,” I was genuinely freaked out. It wasn’t just the emotions that scared me. For all intents and purposes, Wolves might as well have been my first emo album. These weren’t Green Day’s songs about teenage troubles Wolves felt like waking from a lucid dream that forever alters your perception of the world which, in this case, is how cruel it can be. I wasn’t quite old enough to understand the lyrical content, but the impressions were there. ![]() I was not aware that I could feel the ennui that I did after listening to Wolves for the first time. #Rancid 20 years down shirt sale crackedThe moment I hit play, however, my brain cracked open, unleashing bigger emotions than what’s probably healthy for an impressionable 11 year-old. Maybe I’d be better adjusted, more socially adept and blissfully ignorant of the world’s indifference if I never bought the CD. By now, that riff is Pavlovian to me, inducing a reaction as visceral, iconic and meaningful as the opening to Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On,” or George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.”Īnd then some days I wish I hadn’t heard that riff at all. Twenty-five years after its release, the song that kicks off Rancid’s …And Out Come the Wolves still has an indelible effect: Ten seconds of ambient city sounds, a far-off churchbell, a mournful wind whooshing through an alley-all before bassist Matt Freeman’s four-count riff gives rise to what may be the most vicious song to come out of the mid-’90s. Sometimes I wish that I could go back and hear the intro to “Maxwell Murder” for the first time. ![]()
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