As I'm sure is true of 90% of Pitchfork's readership, I have no epochal stories where my mind gets blown apart at an 80s Bad Brains show-- although I did have a couple of permanent teeth knocked out when I finally heard the band's 1982's self-titled "yellow tape," with songs like "Sailing On" and "Banned in D.C." positively shredding all advance hype. Unlike the uglier, post-grindcore 90s hardcore I was devouring at the time, there was a clean, hooky quality to Bad Brains' tumult, and though I didn't know it then, the jazz fusion they'd burned through as apprentices in the Chocolate City scene allowed their music to turn at subconsciously funky angles that would have sent most of their peers scrambling for Dramamine. And yes, that they were African-Americans still matters, as should be obvious to anyone who's disconcertingly watched the pasty wave of bobbing heads at a punk show, whether in 1977 or 2007.
With that tape as the formalist high point of early hardcore, even Bad Brains themselves had to branch sideways instead of taking us higher, with more gloss and more metal on subsequent LPs. Following the release of 1983's Rock for Light, they would be plagued by legal troubles, break-ups, reformations, and perhaps most humiliatingly, briefly losing the rights to their own damn band name. But even when the reunion albums flopped or singer H.R. ran embarrassingly afoul of the law, we always had the earlier records. The 1996 CD reissue of the yellow tape came with a quote where Adam Yauch of Beastie Boys messed himself over its life-changing qualities, and that überfan status might be part of why he was drafted to record the band's first real comeback album under its true name since 1995's forgettable God of Love. Build a Nation is neither the equal of those first three Bad Brains albums, nor as disappointing as the string that followed. It is, however, an awesome, if intermittently frustrating, release from a band whose musicians, singer, and producer often seem at cross purposes.
Age hasn't slowed the band by much, but they've spread out, with Build a Nation picking up where the lowdown, growling grooves of 1986's metallic crossover classic I Against I left off. Bad Brains' twentysomething thrashing-- where they blasted with a fluidity that took your breath away but never sacrificed hardcore's brutish bump-- is still more convincing to my aging punk rocker's ears as the band approaches middle age, at least more so than the mid-tempo, circle pit-friendly material they helped to invent with "Re-Ignition".
Of course, pioneer status doesn't mean you can't fall prey to blandness, but virtuosity can still get you pretty far when wedded to ballpeen brutality. So at the same time as Build a Nation tracks like "Pure Love" and "Let There Be Angels (Just Like You)" will win out for fans of the blistering ROIR tape over crunchy headbangers like "Jah People Make the World Go Round", Dr. Know's scouring-pad guitar leads (check the opening of "Universal Peace" or the breakdown in "Send You No More Flowers") still slay 90% of hardcore axe men, and the band's bass sound remains a thrilling drag-strip roar that's been molded into a fluid, jazzy funk-plunk. Plus, the band's reggae is more fully-assed here-- catchy, even-- with the sheet metal dub effects on "Natty Dreadlocks 'Pon the Mountaintop" ditching the ersatz quality that often marred their roots.
Credit for the sonic brawn has to go in part to producer Yauch, but some of his other studio decisions are a bit more suspect. What torpedoes Build a Nation is the heavy cream of reverb and echo that drowns the vocals-- an especially heinous decision from a producer for whom words are such an important part of his day job, and for a band whose frontman once channeled as much runaway abandon as the guitar or rhythm section. H.R. flits on Build a Nation between two modes-- a gnarled sort of Rasta-Yoda delivering fragmented chant-raps, and that classic Valley skater sneer that bequeathed such helpful concepts to punk as the positive mental attitude and the need to hunt vampires-- but too often he's reverbed into an apparition floating through his bandmates' demolition. Perhaps that's not such a bad thing given that lyrically he's either been spinning his "one love" wheels or taking Rasta's homophobic/gynophobic shtick a little too literally since the late 80s, but nonetheless a shame for fans of kineticism. Who's to say whether or not this decision to diffuse the Brains' most distinctive instrument in a smothering layer of distracting effects was a conscious move or a failure of nerve on the part of the singer, producer, or both. It would have been nice if a little more of that classic back-flipping, elbow-throwing energy made it onto the disc.
