But while bands like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots tacked on no end of extra solos and choruses to their songs, Sublime mostly just jam out. Sublime sprawls to nearly an hour, as was common in the decade for bands luxuriating in the possibilities of the CD. Nowell’s widow Troy has expressed concern that her husband’s death has overshadowed the music, but Sublime holds up astoundingly well – in part because it wasn’t bogged down by the trappings of major-label ‘90s alt-rock. Nowell died of a heroin overdose before Sublime’s release, after which fans swooped down and gobbled up the album like so much carrion. This might strike one as odd given this record’s clout, but it’s easy to forget Sublime were never legends during their lifetimes. One of the first things Nowell steals in “Miami” is a P.A. “Garden Grove” isn’t about traveling down the interstate to the next stadium of screaming fans but about a trip in a van reeking of dogshit to play a five-dollar punk show an hour away. The world he creates – one of heroin, oppressive sunshine, shitty venues, unmade beds – flashes vividly before our eyes. Delightful throwaway details abound, like the “ seven horny brothers” that give “Wrong Way” a bit of fairytale whimsy it admittedly doesn’t deserve. When he gets rolling on a lyrical tangent, like the laundry list of problems on “Garden Grove” or the stream-of-consciousness rants on “Jailhouse,” he sounds intoxicated by his own words. ![]() Nowell never relies on cliche or empty aesthetic mumbo-jumbo, and even the song called “Under My Voodoo” is a tongue-in-cheek Hendrix pastiche. If not, that would make “Miami” awfully incongruous with the sharp wit and photographic eye for detail Nowell displays throughout Sublime. I’ve seen plenty of interpretations of “Miami” as deathly serious, but I suspect that even with the wanton cultural appropriation throughout the album, the 27-year-old Nowell was too smart to just think the King riots were just about “ screamin’ 187 on a motherfuckin’ cop.” In the album’s most self-conscious song, “Ap(Miami),” Nowell joins the Rodney King riots just to steal all the shit he always wanted, hardly caring about the cause of the chaos and happy to just have a bottle of Crown Royal. At one point, he’s too lazy to masturbate. When his dog runs away, he just waits around until the pound calls. A lot of the album is about drifting through life with as little effort as possible it’s slacker rock all the way. From a distance, it’s harder to hear the hurt.Īpathy is a persistent theme. In order to get the full emotional spectrum, you have to dig a little deeper, which is perhaps why it gets so many plays as bong-rip background music. This, in spite of the lunk-headed nature of most of the album, makes Sublime a more layered and mentally engaging album than many of its alt-rock peers. The music here is always sunny, even when the content isn’t: there are no musical cues that tell you to feel bad, like strummed guitars or maudlin pianos. ![]() One of Sublime’s strengths is it doesn’t hit you in the face with its pathos in the way Sublime’s fellow SoCal junkies The Red Hot Chili Peppers are wont to do with their ballads. Is he content or just numb? Is that why the music here is so consistently happy despite all the horrible shit he sings about? His frank admission that he’s trying to seem happy when he’s not casts a dark shadow on the next song, “What I Got,” where he declares he doesn’t get sad when Louie runs away. ![]() He wants to seem happy but there’s a big, black hole in his soul. “Garden Grove” is his introduction: we learn that he’s from L.A., he’s got a badly behaved dog named Louie and he’s addicted to heroin. ![]() Wilson’s an itchy-fingered bassist and Gaugh slams the drums competently, but at the end of the day, Sublime is a character piece centered around Nowell. “Garden Grove” is truly one of the great album openers of all time, setting the stage for a world Nowell, Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson would spend the better part of the next hour completely inhabiting. The original sequencing was finally made available on the album’s 10th anniversary deluxe reissue back in 2006, and listening to that version, it’s astounding that anything but “Garden Grove” could be the first track. Initially, leader Bradley Nowell wanted the album to start out with a short cover of Bob Marley’s “Trenchtown Rock” before segueing into “Doin’ Time,” which is now the album’s closer. What you get on Sublime is not the band’s original vision.
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