Album review: Rancid: 'Let The Dominoes Fall'

RANCID: 'Let The Dominoes Fall' (Hellcat)

‘Let the Dominoes Fall’ has been a long time coming. Rancid have been on an extended hiatus since 2003’s lacklustre ‘Indestructible’, but now, after six years, the East Bay foursome have returned with an LP that acts as a melting pot of their previous recordings. There are very few roads less travelled here; the nineteen tracks fall into one of two camps: the reggae orientated sounds of the last album and the territorial punk moments of their early material.

This technique produces mixed results. Armstrong channels the laid back spirit of his 2007 solo effort, ‘A Poet’s Life’, on the record’s more political tracks: Specials-style keyboards abound on ‘Liberty and Freedom’ and ‘That’s Just The Way It Is Now’, while ‘Civilian Ways’, a soldier’s lament, features a banjo as its central instrument. These distract somewhat from the message and make the pace painfully slow, threatening to send the listener to sleep rather than to the streets in protest.

When the band crank up the guitars, they tend to drop their polemical streak, favouring self-reflective storytelling instead. This has been the feather in their cap in years past, and when it works, it works damn well. Armstrong and Fredericksen are masters at painting a picture with words: ‘New Orleans’ is a perfect depiction of the city, and a cracking tune to boot. The best moment, however, is the acoustic ‘The Highway’, in which Tim discusses the experiences of the past eighteen years with a world-weary lyric designed to tug the heartstrings of even the most die-hard punk idealist.

Unfortunately, the other attempts at self-examination are rather less successful. Leadoff single ‘Last One To Die’ is a horrible mess of clichés, with a chorus so desperate to justify the band’s existence that it ends up doing the opposite. The title track, meanwhile, attempts to portray defeatism with the rather useless refrain ‘No no no no no no no/Na na na, I ain’t got control.’ And then there are songs like ‘LA River’, which indulge in embarrassingly meaningless frivolity, with lyrics like ‘Boom shackalackalackalackalackaalacka boom/ Shimmy shimmy shake shimmy shake shimmy shimmy shimmy’.

In trying to recapture prior glories, ‘Let The Dominoes Fall’ fails to create many of its own. When Rancid get it right, boy, do they get it right, but when they get it wrong, it leaves them seeming tired, desperate and irrelevant. Buy ‘…And Out Come The Wolves’ instead. (5/10)