Green Day present Generation Punk

 This week's pick is a CD that came free with the NME in June 2005 to coincide with Green Day's huge shows at the Milton Keynes Bowl that summer. It comprises 14 tracks apparently chosen by the band to represent the best of punk rock, past and present. This might be my favourite ever magazine freebie based on the amount of great music it introduced me to and I still play it on occasion. Lets dive in. 

1. My Chemical Romance - Give 'Em Hell, Kid 🔵
What an intro - it races in like a motorcycle going at twice the speed limit. This would have been one of the first MCR songs I heard, as this came out a couple of weeks before I bought their album Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. It's a really exciting song with its relentless pace, guitars which are almost heavy-metal-sounding, the effects on Gerard Way's voice... This is the shape of punk to come and it sounds amazing. 

2. The Distillers - Drain The Blood 🔵
Brody Dalle is so cool and I love the combination of her voice with the buzzsaw guitar part. Drain The Blood is dripping with attitude - if this song was a person you would cross the street when you saw it coming towards you. I love this mood for a great punk record and it has a cool false ending too.

3. Generation X - Kiss Me Deadly 🔵
Here we have Billy Idol before he went to Hollywood. The clean guitar and vocal for the first verse, then the drums and distortion midway through verse 2, means this is a bit different from some of the identikit 70s punk that I've written about in the past. The lyrics paint a scene of young love, loitering, experimenting and fighting - it's really evocative and you can see how their storytelling influenced the likes of Jesus Of Suburbia. This song keeps building until it passes the 4 minute mark, where it slowly comes to an end again. The whole thing feels a lot like sitting on the night bus watching the scenes outside and the other passengers on your way home. 

4. Operation Ivy - Knowledge 🎀
A Cali punk classic that Green Day covered on their first album and have been playing live ever since. It's a fast and furious ode to the pressure of being asked to pick a career in your teens, with yelled lyrics including the iconic chorus "all I know is that I don't know nothing". I love everything about this song, it's one of my favourite punk tracks and I'm glad Green Day put it on this compilation so I could hear the original version alongside their slowed-down cover.

5. AFI - The Days Of The Phoenix 🎀
I wasn't bothered about this song when I first heard it, but in the years that have followed it has become one of the first that spring to mind when I consider the contenders for my favourite song of all time. I love everything about The Days Of The Phoenix - the iconic guitar riff and bassline, Davey Havok's goth-influenced vocals, the massive singalong chorus... it's perfect. The spoken word interlude where Davey purrs about his dream of 'teenage death boys... teenage death girls...' might be my favourite bit, but honestly it's hard to choose. The lyrics are a recollection of going to punk shows at the Phoenix Theater - moshpits, punk kids - a dream of a place from Davey's youth that's now long gone. It gives me similar flashbacks to the magical underground world of the rock club I frequented in my early teens which sometimes played AFI for me on request. I love this song so much that when I saw the band play it live in 2017 I shed a single tear of joy. 

6. Iggy & The Stooges - I Got A Right 🔵
The original punk. This sounds riotous despite it sounding like it was recorded in a tiny box. Iggy growls and screams the lyrics as if he's rolling around in broken glass (as he was known to do on stage from time to time). The song opens with a big messy chord and ends with The Stooges individually deciding to stop playing, as if they got bored and decided not to give the song a proper finish. The attitude of songs like St. Jimmy on American Idiot hold a mirror up to the likes of Iggy. 

7. MC5 - The American Ruse 🔵
Next up, another set of punk pioneers. This has a 60s groove and speaks of the hippy struggle - protest, the draft, the overall shitness of living in the USA. In other words, it's American Idiot; the American Ruse, not the American Dream. Still, it's a far out song with a hip guitar solo and it's cool to hear something in this style that has the punk attitude. 

8. Alkaline Trio - Back To Hell 💜
We come bang up to date - for 2005, anyway - with a cut from the contemporary Alkaline Trio album, Crimson. I wrote about them on the Kerrang Best Of 2005 entry and these aren't the only 2 magazine CDs I have with songs from this album, so I think Alkaline Trio's label were doing a big push to shift units (it's a great album though, I will get to it at some point). The drums are the focal point on this, so fast and chaotic, and like MCR the song hits you with a punch. It has a massive chorus paired with the band's trademark dark lyrics: references to pills, hell, sin, ash, bugs... you name it. Again it comes in under 3 minutes, a non-stop, heart-racing punk jam. Maybe one of their best songs, in my opinion. 

9. Deftones - Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) 💜
One of the less obviously punk tracks, this is like a metal band discovering shoegaze, with oppressive droning guitars and Chino Moreno's drawn-out vocals. It sounds like driving through a really heavy storm, the wall of sound washing over you like sheets of torrential rain. Be Quiet And Drive is one of my go-to songs if I want to listen to something heavy; it ticks all of my boxes, despite being another of the songs that I didn't 'get' when I first got this CD as a 12 year old. I've seen Deftones live twice - once at a festival with MCR where my main memory is being at the edge of a muddy moshpit and trying not to fall in, and the other time I listened to them from the floor at the back of a room, recovering emotionally from the AFI set I mentioned above. 

10. Dead Kennedys - California Uber Alles 🔵
Time for some politics. The intro to this song has a sinister surf-rock vibe before Jello Biafra begins his tirade, comparing the Californian governor to the Nazi regime. The whole thing sounds really evil and frightening, as if that one Beach Boy who knew Charles Manson got the rest of the band into Satanism. Again, the influence on American Idiot is clear, both musically in that the riff sounds like the melody to Extraordinary Girl, and lyrically - Green Day cover similar subject matter on the b-side Governator. 

11. Filter - Captain Bligh 🔵
This is pretty good, considering Filter are, I think, one of those post-grunge US alt-rock radio bands that I usually find pretty lame. The mix of layered guitar parts, pounding drums and dark lyrics keep up that relentless pace set by MCR and Alk3, and the chorus slows things down and gets more Deftonesy. In the second half of the song we get an electronic breakdown, a funk guitar solo, acoustic guitar, drum machine and piano fade out, which is a lot of elements to throw in and some work better than others. Again there are shades of Green Day's 9-minute epics from this era but Green Day do it much better.

12. Flamin' Groovies - Golden Clouds 🟢
We get one big messy chord to introduce this - the same as the Stooges used earlier, but I think this probably came first. I don't know anything else about the Flamin' Groovies aside from this song in this context but both the band name and harmonies are big clues to it being from the 60s. It's psychedelia mixed with a bit of a country twang and I can imagine hippies getting down to it at a Happening. I don't think it sounds really 'punk' aside from that intro but it's a groovy song and I quite like it.

13. Stiff Little Fingers - Tin Soldiers 🟢
After an almost entirely American compilation (I think Generation X are the sole British contribution), we draw to a close with an Irish punk classic courtesy of Stiff Little Fingers. They're political, like Green Day and some of the others here, but they're not singing about far-off wars in Iraq or Vietnam - their trouble is on their home turf. It has an army march rhythm with a chanted chorus and lyrics about young men giving up their youth to fight in a war they don't believe in. It would be better (and I'd probably have rated it blue rather than green) if the outro wasn't so long - clocking in at 2 minutes, it's longer than some of the other songs last in their entirety. Even still, it's a great political statement of a punk record.

14. Green Day - Letterbomb 🔵
The Kathleen Hanna 'nobody likes you' taunt that introduces this song is a tease, conjuring thoughts of the riot grrrl song that could and should have taken pride of place in this compilation (I think Brody Dalle of the Distillers is the only woman represented in these 14 bands). We end with an album cut from American Idiot with lots of punk hallmarks - urgency, political lyrics, huge drums all getting a look in. I always saw this as being tacked on to the end, a sort of encore after all of the other songs, but after thinking about how the last 13 numbers influenced American Idiot, it is actually good to hear Green Day at the end rather than opening with them. It's really hard for me to give a review of songs like Letterbomb because American Idiot has been part of my life for so long and I know every note of it inside out - it feels like it's as much a part of me as my fingers and toes. 

For a free CD, the quality of this compilation is outstanding. Almost every song contained here still features in my playlists - some were immediate favourites, some have grown on me over the years, some acted as a gateway to discovering new scenes and bands who have become some of my most cherished. Until now, it hadn't dawned on me how much it functioned as a map to understanding where American Idiot came from too - that album changed my life and there are so many clues here to some of the less obvious influences that helped to make it. I also hadn't realised how many of the acts were American - it's a punk compilation without the Clash, the Pistols, the Ramones, the Buzzcocks... I think England has this impression that they invented and perfected punk with a token few US acts - a myth perpetuated by the NME - and here we have an alternate history which argues punk didn't explode from nothing in 1976 and die a couple of years later. I have a lot to thank Green Day and the NME for. 

Music Review: Kerrang! Best Of 2005

 I was a Kerrang! reader for approximately a decade, starting with the Christmas 2004 double issue (Good Charlotte's Madden twins on the cover) and ending around the time that The Blackout split up, by which time I was no longer following any of the bands who were featured in the magazine.  Those first couple of years were when it made the biggest impact on me, as I was entering my teens and figuring out who I wanted to be, and I remember the style of humour, the posters that adorned my walls, the catalogues for alt clothing companies, and the CDs that came free with the magazine a few times each year. 

I've only kept some of the CDs that came cover-mounted on issues of Kerrang! and of those, this is the one that I remember the most fondly.  Specifically, I remember the week it came out - my friends and I sought refuge in the school library at lunchtimes and one day we were gathered around one of the school's new laptops, flicking through the tracks on this compilation.  There are bands on here who I already loved and owned the albums by, some who I vaguely knew through K!TV and the rock show on my local radio station, and others whose names and faces I'd seen in the magazine but not had a chance to hear yet.  Looking at the tracklisting now, there are a few songs on there that I can't recall at all which surprised me as I remembered it being amazing from start to finish but I think my brain has combined it with the other CDs of the year that showcased the best of the 2005 festival season and that year's Kerrang! Awards Nominees.  Lets dive in. 

1. Nine Inch Nails - The Hand That Feeds 💜
I remember this song as a staple of the rock club I frequented every Friday night from January 2005 until it closed a few years later, as well as the Saturday night Radio Borders Rock Show which had the same DJ.  A sexy industrial number, this was the first NIN song that I came across and I loved it then and still do.  This song showed me that rock music could use synthesisers and didn't have to stand in direct opposition to the dance music that was a guilty pleasure for me a year or two earlier.  Being 12 years old at this point, I was firmly in my elitist 'rock music is good and everything else is shit' period so I think Trent Reznor really broadened my mind in these few minutes.  I always planned to get properly into Nine Inch Nails as I love their sound, but that time hasn't come yet; maybe this could be our year.  The Hand That Feeds really puts me back on that sticky dancefloor, dressed all in black and finding a safe space to explore who I was going to be.  It fits in just as nicely with the music I listen to most now as it did with my collection in 2005, a perfect opener to this collection.

2. HIM - Rip Out The Wings Of A Butterfly 🟢
HIM were huge at this point in my life.  When this CD came out, I had a ticket to see HIM the following year and had bought their Best Of which was full of romantic, gothic hard rock.  Ville Valo was treated as a god by Kerrang! magazine.  This has a cultish (and The Cult-ish) romance to it and I remember it being bit on music TV.  It's a decent goth pop song and if it had come out 15 years earlier I think they'd have been mainstream stars instead of music for teenage girl moshers - I was surprised to find out that this was a Top 10 hit single as I remember them being treated as huge stars of the underground.  I didn't have this album but borrowed it from a friend to put on my iPod, however I didn't love it enough to burn my own copy so there's only one other HIM song from this era in my collection and I parted ways with them after that.

3. Team Sleep - Our Ride To The Rectory 🟢
I don't really remember this song as it didn't resonate with me aged 12.  As an adult I'm interested in what Chino Moreno does as he has great taste in music and the Deftones as essentially a heavy shoegaze band.  The chorus of this is familiar to me and it's definitely closer to my current music taste than my 05 taste with its slow pace, soaring vocals and electronic elements.  It builds up in an interesting way and feels a bit like a night drive which is my favourite thing about the song.  I don't think I'd sit and listen to a Team Sleep album but this is alright.  

4. Fall Out Boy - Sophomore Slump Or Comeback Of The Year 🔵
I already liked Fall Out Boy at this point and I think I either already owned the album this comes from (From Under The Cork Tree) or was about to buy it as I have a feeling this song was new to me at this point and might even have been the deciding factor in making the purchase.  It's one of my favourite Fall Out Boy songs, full of MSN screen-name lyrics, most notably "the best part of 'believe' is the 'lie'" but I definitely used 'well-read and poised' as well.  Patrick Stump has a really distinctive voice which, combined with the lyrics, is probably why Fall Out Boy rose above their peers to become the defining emo band of the year.   It's a good, clever little pop punk song that still brings me joy and I still know all the words so it was good to hear this.

5. Blink-182 - The Rock Show 🔵
I've never understood exactly why this song is on the Best Of 05 considering it came out in 2001.  I think the band might have gone on hiatus in 2005 so it might have been included as a tribute, but regardless of the reason, it's a great song.  I knew it already as it's included on another rock compilation I bought in 2003 and I think we had some Blink-182 albums in the house by this time as they were one of my favourite bands in the lead-up to my K!-buying years, so their inclusion was welcome.  The Rock Show is super catchy and fun, an ode to a cool girl that's written without putting anyone else down in the process - truly a classic pop-punk single that deserves to be played when I go out post-covid.  

6. Green Day - St. Jimmy (VH1 Storytellers Version) 🔵
The main event!  Green Day were everything to me at this age; American Idiot came out the year before and I spent a lot of 2005 catching up with their back catalogue.  I'm sure I had a VHS recording of the VH1 Storytellers show where they played the album from start to finish.  St. Jimmy is such an exciting song in the context of the album and even removed from that and placed here, it's still exhilarating.  Also exhilarating is the opportunity to hear a live Green Day recording which is so full of energy even though I'm sure this took place in a TV studio with people sat at tables, rather than the Milton Keynes Bowl.  I never got to see them in this era which I don't think I'll ever get over.  I love this song... and don't you fucking wear it out (dun-dun-dun-dun)!

7. Alkaline Trio - Time To Waste 🔵
I saw Alkaline Trio in November 2005, a decision that was based purely on the strength of the songs included on cover-mounted CDs like this one, and I got into them in a big way.  Time To Waste is so macabre with its piano intro leading to this big expansive punk sound and huge chorus.  I found this song so intriguing at the time; I don't hear it often these days so that feeling comes back to me when I stumble across it now, like I must find out more about them.  I'm excited to cover Alkaline Trio in more depth in future posts so that I can dive back in to those albums that I loved so much at the time.

8. Funeral For A Friend - All The Rage (Demo) 🟢
I didn't get into FFAF until a bit later so this song felt like a bit of a dead spot for me on the album at the time.  A big deal was made out of the fact that they were Welsh which I thought was cool, in fact looking at the CD now, they're the first British act to feature.  All The Rage isn't their best song but it has a decent chorus.  The version here is a demo but it sounds fully formed - I don't think I've ever heard the finished version as I never bought any of their albums, although I did see them a couple of times at festivals in the early 2010s.  

9. Trivium - A Gunshot To The Head Of Trepidation 🟠
And now on to the metal portion of the disc.  Kerrang! loved Trivium in 2005 and so did the metal boys at my school who I half-knew from Friday nights - I remember overhearing them asking to borrow the album from each other.  That meant that I felt like I had to like this more than I actually did.  There are a couple of Trivium songs that I remember liking more than this one which I'm not really into.  It's heavy, shouty and has that type of metal guitar solo that I hate, both in terms of the tone and the length - it takes ages.  That's followed by a chant bit which I guess would have been massive at Download Festival that year.  The song isn't the worst but I do feel like I would skip it under normal circumstances which is why I've rated it this way. 

10. Bullet For My Valentine - The Poison 🟡
This is another band I felt that I was supposed to like, and actually did like some of their stuff.  Their lyrics were perfectly suited to my angsty teen emo phase so their early singles hit me at the right time.  The Poison isn't one of the songs by them that I'd reach for but at least it has a catchy chorus.  The main riff that appears both at the intro and after the solo is pretty good as well.  I don't really like this sort of thing but I can see some merit in it.  BFMV are the second and final British group on the CD and they're also Welsh so I guess this was a bad year for English rock bands. 

11. Rammstein - Benzin 🔵
My introduction to Rammstein; I bought their album on the strength of this song and unfortunately the rest of it wasn't as good so I no longer own it.  The song is in German but from what I can gather it's just a list of chemicals (benzin = petrol).  Like Nine Inch Nails it's industrial but this is a bit heavier.  It's another dancefloor filler though, big 'dance music for goths' mood.  I remember us all loving it when our school had a German Exchange and lots of people brought their partners to the club who dutifully put this on.  This is the only Rammstein song I ever got into but you know what, even though it's a bit ridiculous, I would still listen to it now.

12. Every Time I Die - Kill The Music 🟢
The snarling dog intro crashing into brutal hardcore sounds really great.  Gerard Way sings the chorus to this song which also sounds amazing contrasted with the music - My Chemical Romance had their first big year in 05 so their presence is missed on the album; it's nice to hear Gerard's voice even if it's on another band's song.  My other highlight is the end part which plays with slowing down and then launching another attack.  Kill The Music is heavy but I like it, partly because of that chorus but also because it has more in common with the likes of Glassjaw than Trivium.  

13. Arch Enemy - My Apocalypse 🟠
Our token woman of the compilation is Angela Gossow, singer with Arch Enemy.  The heaviest song of all, she was well-known for her death metal growl.  However, this is easily my least favourite track - I think melodic death metal sounds really horrible.  It's impressive that Gossow made it to the top of such a male-dominated genre but I do think they were treated as a novelty act at the time.  The song felt like it lasted forever with lots of places where it could have ended but just kept. on. going.  I would happily never hear another melo-death song again. 

14. Avenged Sevenfold - Bat Country 🟡
Another favourite band of K!.  They open with the quote at the start of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: "he who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man", and from then on it sounds like being on a Hunter S Thompson rollercoaster.  The band were always photographed looking like a dangerous biker gang but they also sometimes wore eyeshadow which was a little confusing; I guess they were adding the excess of Motley Crue, Thompson and the Hells Angels together into one thing.  M Shadows' voice is really nasal and whiny and the guitars somehow sound the same, creating a really unpleasant sound.  There's a lot going on here between the guitar solos and the excessive cowbell and the catchy vocal hooks that get a bit lost in amongst it all.  Listening to Bat Country is genuinely a bit tiring.  It's the musical equivalent of the big break film where the director crams all of their niche interests into one script (see: Under The Silver Lake, The Love Witch, Gregg Araki's Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy).  Unfortunately, while I love that in a film, it combines into a big mess in a song.  I thought I really liked this song so it was a surprise to listen to it again and find that it's not as fun as I remember.

15. Coheed & Cambria - Welcome Home 🟢
Finally we come to the closing track and it's an epic.  Right from the start it feels like we're going into a big fantasy adventure - if this was a film, it would be something akin to Lord Of The Rings.  Maybe I say that because Kerrang! made a big deal out of the fact that their music was an accompaniment to a sci-fi comic that the singer wrote, or maybe it's just because it's the most prog-rock sounding song of the collection.  Claudio Sanchez's voice is so unexpected after seeing them in the magazine; he was a big guy with huge hair but he sings in a high register.  I shouldn't like this song - it's pompous, fantasy prog-metal - but I am actually quite taken in by it.  Sanchez is a genuinely talented vocalist and the song is well-constructed with twists and turns like you'd expect from a soundtrack.  There are big guitar solos which I don't love as much, especially at the end where the whole thing becomes a big guitar solo before an epic choir takes us to a single-edit fade out.  I probably couldn't cope with a whole album of this stuff but I'm okay with these few minutes.

Kerrang! Best Of 2005 is a pretty good encapsulation of the music I liked and thought that I ought to like in 2005.  There are a couple of glaring omissions in that there's no My Chemical Romance or System Of A Down, who were two of the biggest Kerrang! bands of that year, and there's only one woman (I remember being into European symphonic metal with operatic female singers to an embarrassing extent at this time).  They got the best song out of the way first and my ratings show exactly what you'd expect of me - I like the pop punk and the bands who grew up listening to Depeche Mode.  I'm glad I don't have to pretend to like Trivium and Avenged Sevenfold any more, but a lot of these songs remind me of specific people, places and moments from 2005 so I can enjoy the memories if not the music.  I'm off to see if Green Day's VH1 Storytellers episode has been uploaded to YouTube.