The Offspring
Days Go By

Maybe The Offspring are coming back! Or rather, they want to return to their former selves. I feel it! I feel all of this while listening to their latest studio work. After albums where they shifted their genre to become commercial and widely appealing, they now return with this new record, Days Go By.

Expectations are not the best knowing their punk/pop directions by now. Listening to the album makes me change my mind immediately. Melodies, breathless, fast riffs. Maybe they really are back to their old selves, or at least they’re trying. Everything starts with “Future is Now”, a more than convincing track worthy of Ignition. So excitement begins to rise. It continues with a forgettable, but still catchy “Secrets from the Underground”.

The tempos are there, Dexter Holland's voice is as powerful as ever. Something is really happening; the early Offspring are coming back, I keep feeling it and I’m thrilled. Then comes the third track, and the sandcastle of hope I had just built falls apart. The track in question, which also gives the album its title, is “Days Go By”, a song that sounds like a bad copy of “Time Like These” by Foo Fighters. After this first disappointment, they get back on track with “Turning into You”, then pick up speed and grit with “Hurting as One”, a track that seems straight out of Smash. The excitement of this piece makes me forget the dismal “Days Go By”, to the point of already considering from these songs a great comeback. But Offspring like to be playful. After this little gem of punk/hardcore outburst, they inexplicably delve into a ridiculous hip-hop/dance stunt called “Cruising California”, a song which, in my opinion, ruined an otherwise convincing album in its genre. Sadness overwhelms me. I can't believe it. But I go on and swallow the bitter pill, finding myself with yet another song, “All I Have Left is You”, which I would not have wanted to hear on an Offspring album. With “Oc Guns” comes a curious experimentation, perhaps pointless or perhaps not, but in its strangeness, it becomes increasingly intriguing. It feels like a piece born from the union of Ixnay On The Hombre and Americana. All in all, the track seems convincing.

Then raw emotion arrives with “Dirty Magic”, a song already present on Ignition and redone specifically for the album’s twenty-year anniversary. A nice re-edition, even though it seems like a filler song, just to increase the number of tracks. But the track is a classic, almost a masterpiece of theirs, and is accepted without hesitation. Again, it falls into the banal Californian melodies with “I Wanna Secret Family”, then concludes with the two most stunning tracks of the entire work. “Dividing by Zero” is a rain of sharp sounds that leaves no way out, pushing you to the effective closure of “Slim Pickens Does the Right Thing and Rides the Bomb to Hell”, a lengthy title for a song about 2:30 long, which is a summary of everything The Offspring have created from the beginning up to Smash.

Nothing new, but still a great explosive charge, which inexplicably fades and is lost with little songs light years away from their most famous tracks. If someone had told me in '97 that The Offspring in 2012 would write songs like Cruising California, I would have never ever believed it … What a pity!