Congratulations are in order for Teenage Time Killers, the massive, metallic brainchild of Corrosion of Conformity's Reed Mullin and My Ruin guitarist Mick Murphy: with the arrival of their long-gestating debut LP, the duo may have very well set a Guinness World Record for the biggest supergroup ever (excepting, of course, one-offs like USA for Africa and Artists for Haiti). Three years ago, they set out on a mammoth mission to recruit their friends, contemporaries and tour-mates and forge The One Punk Album To Rule Them All. Of course Dave Grohl signed up; from Them Crooked Vultures to Sound City Players, the Foos frontman's got a veritable addiction to side projects. Jello Biafra, Lamb of God's Randy Blythe, Queens of the Stone Age's Nick Oliveri, Slipknot's Corey Taylor: the roster might as well be metal's answer to The Masked Marauders, except the Teenage Time Killers are entirely real, and unfortunately, wholly underwhelming.
Over 20 individual vocalists scream, sing, bark (and in Biafra's case, ramble about Sean Hannity) on Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 backed by various guest musicians; Grohl takes on bass duty on over half the tracks, with Sunn O)))/Goatsnake guitarist Greg Anderson plugging in for similarly long stretches. Listening to the humdrum backbeats of "Ignorant People" and "Plank Walk", you'd have difficulty picking these two out of a lineup. This vagueness carries over into the album's instrumentation as a whole, with some exceptions. Bad Religion guitarist Brian Baker brings some timeless So-Cal punk to "Barrio", an album highlight featuring Alkaline Trio's Matt Skiba that's practically written for top-down summer drives, and the thrashy, ever-so-sludgy fretwork on "Ignorant People" instantly belies the involvement of Anderson.
And so proceeds Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, not so much a punk album as it is a pageant. One minute, Clifford Dinsmore is staging a tepid, one-man BL'AST! reunion on "Power Outage"; the next, Jello Biafra is stumbling onstage to deliver a minute-and-a-half "Ode to Sean Hannity" (yes, dude, we know Fox is evil). The LP's second half is a doldrum of reheated hardcore ("Big Money", featuring Fear's Lee Ving) and second-rate sludge ("Your Empty Soul", with a grumbled lead from Red Fang vocalist Aaron Beam). When the self-titled closer, a TV theme song of sorts, barrels in to whisk the entire thing away, it feels like a last gasp rather than a final hurrah.
Mullin et al had the chance to make something truly epic—who wouldn't want to hear a heavy-as-fuck response to "We Are the World" from dozens of metal's finest? Instead, the 20-track album plays out like a more dudely version of that "Rock of Love" episode where contestants have 30 minutes to bang out a killer tune for Bret Michaels' amusement. Rather than build off each other's styles and arrive at a cumulative, comprehensive sound, Teenage Time Killers' revolving cast have conflated quantity with quality, resulting in a pedestrian product that, at best, offers a decent soundtrack to throwing back beers at Punk Rock Bowling.
