Sublime first hit the mainstream with their self-titled third record, released thirty years ago next month. It would have been their breakthrough, their one-way ticket into the bigtime—except frontman Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose two months before its release. Without Bradley’s sun to orbit around, the rest of the band fell apart. He was the heart and soul of the ska-punk outfit, the face and the voice. “You can just tell, that voice, dude,” goes a sample on Sublime’s impossible fourth album put out last week, taken from a 1998 documentary about the band. “There’s only one who could do it, man.”
Apparently not. Jakob Nowell, Bradley’s son who was only eleven months old at the time of his father’s death, has stepped up to the plate and hit a home run, at least as far as impersonation goes. It’s downright remarkable how much he sounds like the father he never got to know: the scratch in his voice, the tossed-off inflections, the smooth way he cradles even the most vulgar words. But Until the Sun Explodes, the first proper Sublime record released this century, never quite figures out what it’s trying to be. Is it a memorial, or a resurrection? It’s at once an ode to, a museum for, and a Frankenstein-esque reanimation of a band that ended three decades prior.
But the thing about creating a Frankenstein is that the beast will have to stumble on into the future, make a life for itself and develop its own consciousness. But since most of Until the Sun Explodes is preoccupied with chronicling and honoring the Sublime that was, we never get much of a glimpse at the Sublime that is. Rather than becoming a new iteration of the beloved nineties reggae-meets-hip-hop-meets-everything-California act, the album feels more like the work of a particularly ambitious—and accurate—Sublime cover band, even more so than Sublime With Rome. This music is sure to please all the diehard fans who have spent the past three decades craving more like 40oz. to Freedom and Robbin’ the Hood, but there’s something hollow about its resuscitations.
Many of the songs feel like reworkings of the Sublime hits that came before, so much so that they hardly register as new material. The mid-tempo, summery “F.T.R” swaggers along at the same speed as “What I Got,” and the reggae rhythm of “Can’t Miss You” calls to mind that of “STP”’s verses. “Casino Taormina” is a crooner in the tradition of “KRS-One” and “Boss DJ,” but its lyrics about “Costa Rican mamas” and “chicas” are far too weak to justify its tired acoustic balladry, failing to evoke the power of its forebears. The sparse drum beats beneath the forward vocal mix of the G. Love-featuring “Come Correct” feel taken from the playbook of “Waiting For My Ruca,” but where that 1992 song chronicled a relationship with a woman named Ramona who sold “oranges by the freeway,” “Come Correct” says shit like “thank God for marijuana, it’s a miracle drug-AHHH” and “so many evil girlies are mad at me.”
And the lyrics are a consistent weak point. While Sublime has never been the pinnacle of pithy wordplay or emotional vulnerability, Until the Sun Explodes often lacks the variety, specificity, and strangeness that made their earlier work so fun (although “Ensenada”’s oddly sentimental “I just want to make love to a whore” hits that mark straight-on). A lot of the songs err on the vague and cliche, with the latter verses of “Figueroa” feeling like those of a lost 2014 Pitbull track: “I never get charged when I’m on that date / ‘Cause I know how to make ladies feel great / And make ’em feel special and have fun tonight / Listen to the music, and it makes you feel right.” A song like “Gangstalker” aims to strike a similar nerve as the ever-provocative “Date Rape,” but with a chorus that ends in “someone is out to get me / like a villain of the week,” it all feels a bit silly. But the title track, an ode from son to father, is undoubtedly the lyrical standout, from details like “I was thinking about you at your favorite bar / They were playing old pornos on the VCR” to the heart-rending “Is this how it’s supposed to be? / It should have been for you / You instead of me” and “Do you know I owe you my life?”
Of course this version of Sublime is forever indebted to Bradley Nowell—it’s hard, almost sacreligious, to imagine any iteration of the band that wouldn’t be. But as a result, there’s a feeling of preciousness to each line, each chord, each decision: Is this what Sublime would do? And Sublime were many things, but one thing they never were was precious. Experimentation was part of the original band’s M.O.; they smashed together genres with reckless abandon, sampled everything under the sun, always moving toward what was newer, weirder, funkier.
But experimentation goes against any cover band’s raison d’être: the first priority, above all else, is imitation. And while Jakob Nowell’s Sublime is closer to a reanimation of the original group than a pure recreation of it, that philosophy seems to remain, and as a result, Until the Sun Explodes fails to move out of the past and into the present. The album feels almost anachronistic, beaming the band’s mid-nineties sound into the 21st century without augmenting it for the times enough to feel fresh, new, or exploratory. The tragedy of Sublime is that, for fans, it’s one of music’s great what-ifs. What would Sublime look like if it never broke up, if it was still here today? But despite seeming on its face to provide an answer to that eternal question, all Until the Sun Explodes does is ask it again. [Atlantic]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
