Bad Religion Stays True to Formula

Back in 1979, the Clash emphasized that anger can be power if you know that you can use it. Three years later, Bad Religion began using their anger to buttress the SoCal hard-core scene and lay the foundation for their lengthy career in punk.

Unleashing anger is one thing. Cultivating it for nearly 15 years is another--and lately, Bad Religion’s ire has been sounding a little tired. However the crowd that turned out at the Palace on Thursday night for the first of three shows that close the group’s current tour didn’t seem to care.

Fists pumped in the air and bodies bobbed in the pit as the quintet barreled through some two dozen selections, old and new. During the intermittent pauses between songs, frontman Greg Graffin bantered about the good ol’ days of punk and joked that the band would have to play 150 songs to honor all the requests tirelessly shouted from the audience. Unfortunately, without much humor or emotional variety to color the music itself, one song began to blur into the next after about half an hour.

Though Bad Religion has admirably stuck by its ardent punk politics and pop-inflected hard-core musical approach, at the Palace it felt like the crowd ultimately generated more than their fair share of the power.