Social Distortion
Mommy's Little Monster

THE REVIEW

The masterpiece of the '80s by Social Distortion: this is one of those albums that truly makes an impact when you blast it in your car at a ridiculous volume, only then do the seismic shocks gain a "weltchansaung" thickness.
The tracks that make up the album represent punk in many of its forms, from melodic hardcore to surf, including the most commercially prolific pop-punk; a fast and rhythmic but quite melodic punk rock prevails, and all in all, "easy." In short, it increasingly often features music played with the raw guts of a platypus-fool, exuding the anger of original punk motivations.

Numerous well-known names: first and foremost, the battle cries screamed at the top of his lungs by singer Mike Ness: the album opens robustly with The Creeps, between blues-rock guitar chimes and grunge-style shouting, The Creeps lashes out against capitalist society following a classic agit-prop strategy, and the band never fails to inject lethal doses of sarcasm against Western civilization. Another State Of Mind is perhaps the most commercial, the one with the most power pop swing. It Wasn't A Pretty Picture is one of the peaks, harmonically perfect, all riffs in their place, the classic song to put in rock schools to teach young kids who listen to Punkreas and other nonsense what punk-rock is. This piece is a jolt of life, with that way of singing "struggling" and dragging the music behind with difficulty, and that style of moral self-flagellation that exudes execution, grunge before its time?
With Telling Them, they hit the mark again, it's a convulsive vocal-driven power-rock (even though it's always the same boogie strumming, with some old-fashioned riffs, at the same 4/4 tempo), likely that behind the sudden exuberance of the quartet lies styles as old as rock, perhaps the only miss comes from the repetitive Hour Of Darkness, but it picks up momentum immediately after with the title track, enlivened by a beat frenzy. Everything smells of garage rock, of Tartar beach parties, of collegiate enthusiasm, but all under the halo of existential defeat, otherwise, it wouldn't be true roaack (as Bobby freaking Solo would say, the only man who in 2004 says roaack instead of rock). Anti Fashion and All The Answer are once again commendable lost causes with the relentless drumming and crazily screeching guitar, rock and roll chases soaked in torrential rhetoric and bloody imbalance, never for their own sake, but always in service of the cause.

The album closes superbly with Moral Threat, finally dramatic here, with galactic glissandos à la Jimi Hendrix, with one of the most overused riffs in rock history (second only to the riff of Wild Thing repeatedly picked up by bands like MC5 and NY Dolls), but it's the same pandemonium, both in the first part and in the change of tempo leading to the increasingly hyperkinetic instrumental rapture with a B-52 bomber finale where hard rock is scientifically dynamited.