Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 11/07/05
Label: Columbia

As durable and hard-wearing a logo in their milieu as Vans trainers, Orange County's Offspring are chiefly famous for scoring unprecedented chart success as an independent-label act circa "Smash" in 1994, for the punk-community fatwa issued against them when they moved to a major in 1997 and for being, what with microbiology PhDs and all, pretty smart guys.

Only two of these three factors have much bearing on this does-what-it-says-on-the-tin best-of. Tortuous arguments about the corporate shilling being a fairly silly pursuit in the land of Disney and plush middle-class lawns, what we are left with is a convincing demonstration of Dexter Holland and the boys' pop nous, and the suspicion that making energetically "dumb" music is improved by having a fair number of brain cells behind the chugging guitars and loud-soft dynamics.

Even at their most averagely effective - "Can't Repeat" and the speedy, hammering "All I Want" with their patented "whoa-oah-oah"s, a bassy, lowering "Defy You" - they're as forceful and lean a sweat machine as the genre has produced, driven by Holland's great big sarky pair of lungs and an innate ability to sidestep their peers' frat-boy-isms and workmanlike noise-gruel.

And at their most poptastically sly and clever - represented here by a bolshy hidden-track cover of The Police's "Next To You" and a heaping fistful of singles to whom time has been revealingly kind - they burst the stylistic straitjacket of their genre like smirking superheroes in big baggy shorts.

Years later, "Self Esteem"'s overt Nirvana debt takes a back seat to its raging hooks and brusque self-mockery; "Gotta Get Away" has a drumbeat and rocking riff to die for; "Gone Away" boasts a peerlessly powerful vocal that could give metal's most leather-lunged a run for their money; a fresh, funky, sampladelic remix of "The Kids Aren't Alright" attests to a record collection that includes more than the UK Subs.

Above all, however, there are four songs here that offer more fun and finesse than a five-mile-high pile of records by their peers. "Come Out And Play (Keep 'Em Separated)" is still an astonishing feat of disparate elements - snaking surf guitar, gloriously shoutalong chorus and perfectly-timed semi-rap - spot-welded to a gleeful pop juggernaut.

Of the same water are the wickedly catchy and split-second-timed "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)" and bleepy, bouncy, hip-wiggling "Hit That". Best and bitchiest of all, though, is the equal-opportunities critique of the bone-idle him-and-her-indoors of this world, "Why Don't You Get A Job", all calypso steel drums, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" nods and daft hands-in-the-air chorus, strutting its get-off-your-behind message in a conga line down the streets of the suburbs.

Pleasantly for us, Offspring got these jobs. Microbiology can wait.

    by Jennifer Nine