Not so fly

Yes, the guys who did “Pretty Fly for a White Guy” are still around. And yes, their new album sounds like it was made by a band from MTV’s last musical days that
didn’t know how to cross over to the new millenium.
  
While Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace has plenty of The Offspring’s trademark kicking, confrontational music, it’s more full of cliched melodrama.
   
Not that The Offspring ever really were exceptional at striking a balance, though. Even Americana – aka the Offspring album everybody knows (the one that included “Pretty Fly for a White Guy” and “Why Don’t You Get a Job”) – could get preachy when it was trying to tug your heartstrings.
   
But they used to be able to get away with it by not taking themselves seriously. On Americana, they balanced out the moralizing “Staring at the Sun” and “The Kids Aren’t Alright” with the creeper girlfriend tale “She’s Got Issues” and a sarcastic revision of Morris Albert’s “Feelings.”
   
But when the preachiness steps in on Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace, only wincing can save the pain. Here’s a sample from the track “Rise and Fall”: “And I don’t wanna say I told you so/ But I told you so/ Now you’ve lost control/ And I don’t wanna be the rise and fall/ So gimme more or nothing at all.”
   
The thoughtfully named “Stuff is Messed Up” is amazingly even more painful. Instead of conjuring the spirit of an evangelical worship session for insomniacs, lead singer Dexter Holland takes to ranting about how much the state of the nation sucks and stuff.
   
“I don’t know much/ I don’t know too much/ But I know this/ Shit is fucked up!” Holland shouts, followed by a list of evils that ranges from “ecstasy” to “genocide” to “Rehab and LOL.”
   
Rise and Fall’s only saving grace is that, in terms of instrumentation and vocals, the band sounds the same as it did in the ’90s. Holland rants with a pinched voice, and the guitars and drums are loud and speedy.
   
But this isn’t the ’90s, and Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace is not worth listening to.