Good Riddance

Editor's Review:

Howard Cosell once said that "command of language is the most necessary skill to have." With the command of language displayed by Good Riddance on their second full-length CD A Comprehensive Guide To Modern Rebellion, it’s obvious that they have the skills to say something.

Words like assuage, ardent, posterity and pharmacology are used to describe pertinent, graphic social and political situations. These aren’t ordinary rock/punk words, but the message still seems clear: they are bitter about a lot of things.

Just like Rage Against The Machine, they seem to have good cause. Though the music is more like Bad Religion or Social Distortion on their hard-core side and like Green Day or Meat Puppets on their soft-core, melodic side; the lyrics and message are just as searing as Rage’s.

On the brooding, Vietnam-like "West End Memorial," singer Russ R. sings "True freedom they give us/no slaughter too sacrilegious… so quick to murder for posterity/hatred trained to operate manually."

Other songs with cut-to-the-chase lyrics are the hard-core "Trophy," the Green Day-ish "Token Idiot" and the hard-core "The Sky Is Falling" where they sing about "human landfills…" being "the resting place for the enemies of the state." This song conjures up images like from the movie Salvador with James Woods and Jim Belushi were the US-backed Contras were murdering innocent men, woman and children.

They do an up-tempo version of the 1980’s Kinks classic "Come Dancing" and they do a good job of it too.

Some of the more melodic, semi-mellow songs include "Steps," "Up and Away" and the humorous "Lampshade."

My pick for the best song, is track 15 "Think Of Me." Its tempo and rhythm changes picks up, rocks out and settles down all in the right places. And, with lyrics like, "I don’t know how good I had it/I had to treat you like a habit," how could this song not be cool?

Track 17 is one minute, forty-seven seconds and if you let your CD player play for another three minutes and three seconds, the track 18 ensues.

This untitled track is only fifty-four seconds, but it packs a whallop.

Originating in Santa Cruz, California, this hard-core punk quartet demonstrates the independence indigenous to that free-spirited coastal town that’s also required to make quality hard-core punk.

- Bret Lueder


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Record Label Fat Wreck Chords Released April 2001

Tracks 1. Weight Of The World 2. Steps 3. A Credit To His Gender 4. Trophy 5. Up And Away 6. Last Believer 7. Static 8. Favorite Son 9. West End Memorial 10. This Is The Light 11. Bittersweet 12. Token Idiot 13. Come Dancing 14. Lampshade 15. Think Of Me 16. Sky Is Falling 17. Sometimes