Since about the year 2000, Tim Armstrong, Lars Frederickson and pretty much that has anything to do with Rancid has pretty much been a horrible venture, looking your way The Viking, Transplants and the last Rancid album. Prior to listening to this album the only conation I had about The Aggrolites was that they were Tim Armstrong's backing band for his solo project. So admittedly, I had them written off for quite awhile and let the album sit on the shelf for quite a bit. It took me more than a month to getting around and giving the album a shot.
In a broader sense, The Aggrolites face a different challenge- the average person in the year 2007 will probably disregard this band because of genre alone, the whole reggae/ska jive is pretty much dead to most people, with only minor remnants of the third wave around. I, on the other hand, still love ska and all its little sub-categories, so in this facet this is where The Aggrolites had some hope in pleasing me.
The first track on the album is "Work It," which I assume is supposed to be some sort of motto about the band's work effort, yea okay. The music has a nice vibe, but inserted into it is a very out of place keyboard or moog track. As I journeyed further into the album, I hope that these kind of odd effects wouldn't make their return, sadly they did.
The tracks "Reconcile" and "Free Time" are bit more on the mark. With tracks like these, The Aggrolites do demonstrate the ability to exhibit a nice groove a sound that is very akin to listening to on a summer afternoon. Unfortunately though for The Aggrolites, they continued to attempt to squeeze too many bells and whistles, sometimes literally, into their songs often distracting from the nice grooves that I could appreciate. Along with the odd keyboard effects, The Aggrolites attempt all sorts of out of place instrumentation and vocals that were too much to bother with.
With Reggae Hit LA, The Aggrolites are very hit or miss. Sometimes they are pleasing and other times they are very obnoxious. At times they exemplify everything that has caused me to lose faith in people like Tim Armstrong and other times they remind me why I actually started listening to this kind of music in the first place.
See also
Tim Armstrong, The Transplants, High School Parties
