Where'd They Go? The Bosstones are Back

One thing about Liner Notes of which I'm proud is its shameless nostalgia for the music of my Gen X youth. I've always felt, and still believe, the music of my generation was never able to successfully toss off the great canonical weight of '60s rock, even though a great deal of music in the '80s and '90s is just as good if not better. There may be no band for which I suffer more nostalgic love than The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a Boston band that I have seen more times than I can count and often for nearly no cover. It was a band that played around New England (where I'm from) regularly and long before anybody had heard of Nirvana.

I could barely believe it when I learned that just this week the band had a new album, Pin Points and Gin Joints, its first album of new material since 2002's Jackknife to a Swan. The Bosstones are a hopelessly underrated band. Generally regarded as slavishly formulaic, a novelty or just plain uncool, the eight-piece group, fronted by the incomparable Dicky Barrett, were pioneers of the so-called "ska-core" sound, merging hardcore punk with two-tone ska. That sound launched dozens of copycat bands (none of which were nearly as good) and influenced a lot of the pop punk that became so popular.

But the band was always better than the sum of its genre-bending parts. It's founding guitarist Nate Albert was a great musician (I'm sure he still is but he left the band in the late '90s) and the songwriting, much of it by Barrett and bassist Joe Gittleman "The Bassfiddleman," was usually sharp and genuine -- They wrote blue collar anthems of working, drinking, love and loss (of wallets) with a great ear for pop melodies and punk spirit.

The band even came pretty close to becoming a big mainstream act -- they were the prom band in the Alicia Silverstone (whatever happened to her?) film Clueless, playing "Someday I Suppose" and "Where'd You Go?" But it quickly faded from prominence, a one-trick-band. After the well received and commercially successful Let's Face It in 1997, the band faded into obscurity, a step above a '90s one-hit wonder.

The band's fade was hastened by 2000's Pay Attention, which was pretty bad (probably the only real dud in the 'Tones' discography). But the Bosstones switched labels, signing with the punk label Side One Dummy and released Jackknife to a Swan, an album that found the Bosstones recapturing a lot of the old grit and spirit of their early years. It was the sound of a band that had gotten some of its mojo back. It wasn't as great as Devil's Night Out or More Noise and Other Disturbances, but it was better than the band had sounded in 10 years.

Pin Points and Gin Joints slows the tempo down a bit from Jackknife but the mojo is still there. For the new, 14-song set, the Bosstones settle into an easy-skanking groove that favors the two-tone sound, though the punk vamps are still there. Also there are the usual Bosstones themes: Send offs to old loves, drinking (in Boston), Boston, troubled youth (growing up in Boston) and other assorted tales of blue collar living (in Boston). If Jackknife was a return of sorts to Question the Answers, Pin Points finds the Bosstones in the more radio friendly, Special's-like sound of Let's Face It.

And above all that, what's really back is what always made the band great: Bosstone's bonhomie. To draw from the overused hypothetical of the '04 presidential election, The Bosstones were always the band you'd want to hang out and have beers with. They are not hipster doofuses. They are not too-cool-for-school auteurs. The Bosstones are a horn-section away from being construction workers. At least that's what ithas always felt like. Pinpoints has that same beery, singalong quality.

The new album isn't brilliant, it's just very good music. It's exactly what a great band that's been together since 1985 should sound like. In fact, the whole band sounds really comfortable belting out one great ska tune after another... it's not material that is as memorable as the group's classics, and the tunes are certainly predictable (what more can you do with punked out ska?) but it's good anyway. There's no artifice here. It's a band of old friends. Just fun stuff to listen to with that classic Bosstones sound.

And that's good enough for me.