Educating Omand - The Offspring

In an effort to further her musical education, Susan Omand has been set "homework" of listening to albums released after the 1980s that she has missed out on. This time she says Ixnay on the Hombre with The Offspring...



See the full list of Educating Omand albums

This is one of those albums that I thought I knew from back when it was released, the title was so familiar because The Offspring were EVERYWHERE for a while. It turns out that I know one song by The Offspring and that song isn’t even on this album.



Luckily the songs that were on Ixnay are really good fun to listen to anyway and I was dancing from start to finish, apart from the minute or so of Intermission in the middle where I was so helpless with laughter that I couldn’t dance to save myself.







Every other song has a joyous punky bounce to it, but there’s also a real mix of influences behind them, from the messy guitar and thrash metal of Leave it Behind to Me and My Old Lady, which could have come straight out of the Arabian souks. There were also songs that, although they’re not at all similar, reminded me strongly of other great tracks – Gone Away is so much like Fiction Factory’s Feels Like Heaven, Way Down the Line borrows heavily from the backing for You Really Got Me by the Kinks and Amazed is redolent of George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps.



I also adore the start of Mota. The machine gun percussion sounds so much like Morse code that a huge part of me wants to try and decode it. But my absolute favourite track on the album is Don’t Pick It Up which took me right back to my short lived 2-Tone ska phase in the early 80s. I mean you could drop this track straight on to an early Madness album and it wouldn’t sound out of place. Even the “Baggy Trousers” style dancing worked with it (yes, I did).



So, yes, this time you can consider me educated. And knackered. I’m too old for all this dancing…







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