3 out of 5

Label: Capricorn

Producer: Ron Saint Germain and 311

Look, let’s face something: 311 is dumb.  It’s cool, I like some dumb bands, and I defend them in my own defendy way.  Something a lot of these groups have in common – and I’ll name Reel Big Fish or Sum 41 – is that they generally choose their genre and their attitude and then sorta stick to it.  So thirty years later, undumb people browsing their sophisticated twitter feeds will notice that Band X is playing a show and remark “They’re still around?” while a nearby smelly fan-o-that-particular-dumb will hop to the task and outline the busy yearly or semi-yearly release schedule that ‘still around’ band have maintained, you silly nonce.  Occasionally these groups will go for a ‘mature’ album, like Sum’s ‘Underclass Hero’, or an enthusiastic, niche-stretching near masterpiece – RBF’s ‘How Do They Rock So Hard?’ – but this will not be the pattern, and more often than not that will be one album out of a slew of towing the line.

Which is fine.  It’s what we want these dumb bands for.  So I won’t proclaim that Band X is any particular type of genius, but I’ll probably tell you that if you dig ’em, you dig ’em and appreciate what they’re doing.

So 311 is dumb.  And they’re not geniuses.  And I don’t think that there’s much desire to pen a meaningful lyrical passage or truly complicated and emotional musical interlude so much as there is a desire to write head-nodable tracks in the very, very white rap-rock genre.  Sure, you have the ‘I kicked drugs’ track and the, uh, message tracks like ‘Guns (are for pussies)’, but these words are pretty much just filler.  That’s fine, because it all serves that head-nod purpose, even if I want to shame myself for doing so.  These songs are fucking catchy, god dammit.  The rappy guys vocals are all nerdy annoying and Nick Hexum’s talk-rap delivery is the voice of every douche you hate/loved, but, le sigh, there goes my toe a’tappin’.  Now I do think that the band actually delivers some interesting and potentially more evolved work when they dump the genre shit and try to harmonize and write full songs – like ‘Don’t Stay Home,’ or the chorus of ‘Jackolantern’s Weather’ – but it’s not their bread and butter.  Which is the ‘meh’ quality of 311, that the B&B songs are almost uniformly the same, structurally, sonically, etc.  But on this album, they do a fair job of tossing in heavier tracks (‘Hive’, ‘DLMD’) to break up the vibe.  A lot of this I feel is anchored by Chad Sexton’s impressively nuanced drumming – not that the band is too demanding, but he sets the tone and pace and adds flair where many bands would just stick to a standard beat.  The guitar and the bass otherwise do almost the same thing on every single song, but this might be down to the production, which fucking BURIES anything that’s not distortion or a beat.

Anyhow.  File this in that category of middle school / high school stuff I wanted to snub but… but… maybe I’ll listen to once more…