Let the Dominoes Fall
This is Berkeley, after all, so the tattoo-covered arms couldn’t themselves have been much of a clue. But I can’t help wishing that I’d had a bit more of a sense of whom I was speaking to, so that when the guy I met over coffee and donuts after mass in the church basement told me that he played bass for, as he put it, “a band called Rancid”, I’d been able to blurt out something other than Wow, I TOTALLY listened to you guys when I was a kid.
But anyway. That was then, this is now, and Matt’s younger kid’s baptism was unquestionably the most tattoo-populated sacrament I’ve yet had the pleasure to attend. All of which is just a roundabout way of prefacing the observation that you really ought to watch Matt Freeman and Rancid play on Conan O’Brien tonight! I haven’t yet listened to the new album, but it promises to be quite good, and by all accounts the group that I just saw termed “the quintessential popular punk band of 2009” still puts a good show, the occasional gray hair notwithstanding.
Bonus footage of the band’s new single – with even bonusier footage of classic East Bay haunts and shots of Matt (he’s the one who neither plays drums nor has bicolored hair or a tattooed cranium) looking rather bemused by the whole affair – below the fold:
That’s awesome.
— E.D. Kain · Jun 10, 08:14 PM · #
Baptisms always are.
As for the music…c’mon. The 70s punk style (999, Damned, SLF, etc.) has its pretty definite musical (and moral) limitations and ya gotta grow up sometime!
— Carl Scott · Jun 15, 08:39 PM · #
Well I’ve read that there’s a great deal of stylistic variety on the second half of the new record – but I haven’t yet listened to it, so I can’t speak to that firsthand.
— John Schwenkler · Jun 15, 08:56 PM · #