various artists - Germs of Perfection: A Tribute To Bad Religion

Here's another Spin Magazine comp, this time featuring covers of Bad Religion. As tribute comps go, it's pretty solid. You get 12 artists covering a wide range of B.A. songs, along with a cut from their "Dissent of Man" album. And Spin lined up some decent names for the comp: Ted Leo, Tegan & Sara, Frank Turner, and the Weakerthans are just some of the headliners here. I remember thinking this was a lot more interesting to me than the new Bad Religion record, which had come out a month before this download-only release.

I have some really ambivalent feelings in general towards Bad Religion. I think it's cool that Greg Graffin and Jay Bentley have continued to keep the band going for nearly 40 years. But I'm struggling to think of a Bad Religion record I've been excited to hear since "No Substance". I had no clue that they had released a new record in 2019, or that Greg Hetson hadn't been in the band for seven years. I'm grateful that B.A. is the foundation for the whole Epitaph/Anti- apparatus, without which we wouldn't have gotten some great Tom Waits records, the last two Pianos Become the Teeth albums, and a fair amount of other good-ass records. It's going to sound rude, and there will be a ton of people who disagree, but they've always struck me as a starter band for punks.

Fuck, that was rude.

Anyway, that's a couple hundred words on a band I'm very "meh" about. The comp's good, though. Let's listen to that.

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