3 out of 5

Label: Frontier Records

Producer: Redd Kross

After hearing the band name-checked several million times by various angular punk groups I dug (back in me high schoolin’ days in yonder 1600s or so), along with the marriage ties to that dog.’s Anna Waronker, I was happy and felt cool to pick up RK’s Born Innocent in a used bin – the album by them you’re most likely to find in a used bin, methinks, because it’s probably the sloppiest work from their catalogue, according to my reading.

That’s right, because at this point, I haven’t heard anything else from Redd Kross still, though after giving the album a shot through my then oh-so-virgin ears, I deemed it as derivative and tossed it to the wayside (which amounted to re-selling it, I think, though, dang, I can’t really recall what I did with CDs I didn’t want then.  Maybe this all happened in the 1700s, when I had moved to New York?  OH TIME, WHERE DOTH YE GONE), and then when the group came back up recently – after reviewing Anna’s solo album – I was all like OH and decided to re-listen to it.  ‘Cause my ears are all mature and shit now.

And blessed me, I do get why I brushed this off before.  If I wasn’t interested in hearing what came after this, I’d probably brush it off now, except that now I can acknowledge / accept / hear some of the sloppy awesomeness that bubbles up in about half of the tracks.  But by Me rules, that still wouldn’t be enough to classify it as a keeper, because for every warped ‘Linda Blair’ track, with Jeff McDonald’s fucked-up off-the-rails nasal whine just barely poking over the mashy ADD collaboration of drums, bass, and guitar, there’s a totally typical punk track that slots into that totally typical Ramones verse-chorus-verse 3-chord shtick that I’ve just never been able to rock out to.  So it’s pretty up and down, though I have to admit that if this was recorded in ’82, they have cleaned it up really well for the CD release, all the instruments really shining through when the group remembers to toss in someone actually playing and not just teenagering through another song.

I hope I end up liking the rest of RK’s albums, because I can see how listening to this in retrospect will enrich it – as mentioned, there’s some real passion and inventiveness stuffed into these 2-minute songs, weird licks and staccato picking and flashes of drum-work that I can hear in one of my favorite Cali-punk albums of all time – Wax’s 13 Songs.  But on its own, it’s a little too up-and-down from song to song to make it something to keep in yer shuffle.