Western Addiction

Cognicide

(Fat Wreck)

Record Review by Daniel Brody

Punk rock, the music that once stabbed arena and progressive rock to death with a rusty shiv, has been stuck in the past, recycling the same riffs, lyrics, and fashions the same way as other lame subcultures like Goth and Rockabilly.  Western Addiction’s Cognicide is an album full of backwards-looking eighties hardcore, all dirty guitars and bellowing vocals.  It is as inoffensive as a Black Crowes album, and therein lies its greatest liability: a lack of punk rock danger.

Western Addiction is an amalgam of Fat Wreck Chords employees who decided to form a band.  These are the guys processing T-shirt orders and balancing the books, and their sense of excitement at getting a chance to be the band is palpable all over the album.  The lyrics are a mishmash of punk rock buzzwords, and the overall sound is described perfectly by the song “Church of Black Flag.”  Albums like Damaged and My War are treated like sacred texts, as if Henry Rollins is going to come and personally kick their asses if they deviate from the party line.  All the sludge and ironic misery is in place, but it just doesn’t measure up to the original, and doesn’t care all that much either.  This album is meant to conjure feelings of nostalgia for a time when punk bands weren’t whiny mallrat sellouts, and on that front it is successful.

Lost amid the retro rock is Black Flag’s wicked sarcasm and defiance; Damaged was such a controversial album that a major label refused to release it in all its juvenile delinquent glory.  Cognicide is a product of its punk rock cult, rocking out exactly the way its fans rock out to other punk bands.  It’s not bad, but there’s not much else to recommend it, especially when all those classic Flag albums are still in print.