Some artists forge their moral compasses through imitation and collaboration; others prefer careful study, or prolonged retreats. And then there’s Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, whose rise to fame entailed 20 years of getting his ass kicked: by addiction, by divorce. But Armstrong has been most notoriously pummeled by the Gilman gutter-punks who fostered his metamorphosis from a street kid, to the ska-core luminaries Operation Ivy, to the leader of Rancid, which rose from the ashes of its predecessor to become of the most successful wrecking crews in the recent memory. Just like Rancid’s Bay Area peers Green Day, Armstrong and company’s mainstream ascent drew ire from their DIY compatriots. “Ever since I started playing punk rock, people have said major labels are shit,” Armstrong told Rolling Stone in 1995, a month or so after the band released their LP ...And Out Come the Wolves, “but I have to be shown… I gotta have my ass kicked before I’m gonna really believe any of that.”
Rancid spent the next eight years heeding that warning, rejecting lucrative deals from a slew of big-shot suitors (including Madonna, whose label Maverick Records aggressively courted the band). Then, at the height of Rancid’s appeal in the early 2000s, Armstrong got another ass-kicking when listeners learned that Warner Brothers–gasp!–would be distributing the band’s 2003 album Indestructible. The label’s attempts to obscure their involvement with the LP through the omission of their logo on the album’s packaging and liner notes only amplified Rancid’s perceived betrayal. In time, the poisoned-well narrative overpowered the music itself, even as the band returned to their previously-held, independently-focused distribution approach. Though Rancid’s subsequent work—2009’s Let the Dominoes Fall, 2014’s ...Honor Is All We Know—offered reliable doses of their usual three-chord fury, the thrill had long since vanished. And like it or not, narrative is everything for a punk band.
Armstrong et al can’t turn back the clock and morph into crusty ruffians again. What they can do is honor their past, which brings us to their ninth full-length, Trouble Maker. It’s no coincidence that the LP’s cover art resurrects the stamped-on logo that graced their eponymous 1993 debut: the 17-track effort finds the band examining contemporary political turmoil–blue-collar identity crises, tense demonstrations, the ever-present shadow of the Man– through the prism of their rebellious past, a little more wizened but just as rambunctious as ever. There are no stylistic experiments, no ballads, no bullshit. Instead, Rancid craft a tableau of working-class grit with quick, scratchy strokes: a whirlwind tour of turbulent political rallies and smoke-enshrouded pool halls, factories, and back alleys.
The band’s arrangements remain ephemeral and formulaic as ever. Mumbled verses? Check. Barked choruses? Check. Breakneck solos, courtesy of Lars Erik Frederiksen? Check. But here, Rancid’s first-thought-best-thought palette belies a deeper line of reasoning: a conscious ploy for permanence, timelessness. “Telegraph Avenue” repurposes “Ring of Fire”’s signature chord progression into a heartland-tinged backdrop for Armstrong’s ode to the Bay Area protester, a modern American archetype: “The ones who stand for freedom of speech/Well, this one goes out to you/Well, I can still hear your voice/On Telegraph Avenue.” Lead single “Ghost of a Chance” and the turbocharged “Make It Out Alive” recast the frontman as a street-punk sage. On the former, he peddles the following pep talk with a sugary hit of cynicism: “Well, maybe someday we’ll get a new start/You never grow too old to dream.” So convincing is Armstrong’s barfly-guru approach—all hoarse sing-a-longs, grizzled half-raps, and punchy, prolonged “hey”s and “woah”s—that you almost forget he willingly gave a multinational shampoo company the go-ahead to use his music in that commercial.
About two and a half decades after their inception, Rancid are, for all intents and purposes, a legacy band. It’s a distinction they never asked for, but one they were nonetheless destined to attain, given Operation Ivy’s cult status and the band’s collective ear for tuneful-if-rugged rock hooks. (Let’s not forget that Armstrong co-wrote P!nk’s 2003 hit “Trouble.”) Rancid’s anti-establishment days may be a figment of the past, but the band’s spirit remains inextinguishable; they’ve just had problems harnessing and illustrating it. While Trouble Maker doesn’t usurp the band’s primordial peak, it’s far and wide their strongest effort since 2000’s excellent self-titled. This is about as good as a latter-day Rancid album gets, and for diehards, that’s more than enough.
