It’s not often that you get to cite the most cringeworthy track as the most memorable moment of an album, but let’s go ahead and do just that with ‘Cruising California (Bumpin’ In My Trunk)’ from ‘Days Go By’ from The Offspring.
Coming from a band that have written some of the biggest “novelty” rock songs of the last twenty years, even ‘Cruising California (Bumpin’ In My Trunk)’ is an eyebrow raiser. How any self-respecting artist/person could bear to put that out as a single is a bit of a mystery, but Nickelback still exist so… whatever. Anyway, at least that’s a talking point of ‘Days Go By’; the rest isn’t sure what it wants to be at all. This is most notable in The Offspring does Sublime of ‘OC Guns’, The Offspring does Nirvana-esque overkill re-recording of ‘Dirty Magic’, The Offspring does radio-friendly-rock of ‘All I Want Is You’ and The Offspring does Foo Fighters of ‘Days Go By’. The album never really finds its feet, and where those songs are just about passable on their own, together it’s just a bit of a disjointed mess.
That said, where The Offspring bring pace to ‘Days Go By’ it’s not a total disaster. Opener ‘The Future Is Now’ will sound excellent live, ‘Hurting As One’ should have been where the band said “this is how we want the album to sound” and ‘Turning Into You’ is a perfectly listenable “dark” punk rock song. It’s true that at this point in the band’s career, they really only need to knock a few tracks together to facilitate a few more years of touring, but when there’s a few songs in there that show promise, it’s a shame that the rest falls so flat. ‘Days Go By’ comes across as being an album made for the sake of making an album, and it’s a shame when no one (except the label, assumedly) would have blamed the band for taking a bit longer or putting out an EP instead.
The true shame here is that when Pennywise can lose a singer and get better and Bad Religion still have no trouble knocking out a great record, why can’t The Offspring do something even slightly similar? It might be that the California sun has finally gone to their heads, but ‘Days Go By’ just doesn’t feel like a record the band wanted to make. At all.
TOM AYLOTT