How time flies. I first caught Bad Religion as a very young teenager at the 1998 edition of the Warped Tour, and they were a classic act then. The genres represented on this tour have widened a whooooole lot since then, and the face of punk and its offshoots has changed considerably as well. But Bad Religion is back on it -- and thankfully. Some of these pop-tastic whippersnappers need some schooling in classic, fast, So Cal hardcore-ish-whatever skate-friendly punk rock.
Of course, Bad Religion's guitarist Brett Gurewitz is the head of Epitaph, the ultimate punk rock-ish label that basically spawned the Warped generation.... So it's nice to see things come full circle. He's not the only busy one, though. The band's unfuckwithable frontman, Greg Graffin, teaches life sciences and paleontology at UCLA (guy's got a Ph. D in zoology from Cornell!), and releases the occasional solo album.
As such, it's been a couple years since Bad Religion's last studio album, 2007's New Maps of Hell -- which, proving that either there is a just God or that the apocalypse really is nigh, charted at #35. But as early as 2008, the band revealed that Graffin had been cooking up some new material. And although tour commitments will keep the guys on the road through most of this year, a new album is due out early 2010. That'll be the band's 15th.
If you hit up Warped on Saturday, make sure to pay respects to these punk rock lifers, and enjoy these classic Bad Religion tracks.
American Jesus - Bad Religion
Give You Nothing - Bad Religion
Suffer - Bad Religion
No Control - Bad Religion
Generator - Bad Religion
Bad Religion, at the Vans Warped Tour. Saturday, July 25. Cruzan Amphitheatre, 601-7 Sansbury's Way, West Palm Beach. Doors open at 12 p.m., tickets cost $25.93 in advance, $32 day of show. livenation.com
