When Tim Armstrong's brother Greg first returned from military service in Iraq, the Rancid frontman knew something was wrong. After all he'd seen in the war, Greg couldn't relate to his family and friends the way he used to, and Armstrong could tell that the pain of re-integrating into civilian life had created a gulf between them.
So Armstrong wrote a love song for Greg, telling his brother through his lyrics that even if "the war seems to follow (him) home," there's still hope to one day "fix up them old cars and ride them into the sun."
"When we went into Iraq, our country wasn't at war, 150,000 military families were," Armstrong said, leaning in across a crouch inside the Los Angeles offices of Epitaph Records, the band's longtime label. "It's hard to talk about, so this is my way of telling my family that I love them. When I played this song for my dad, he was in tears."
The stark and tender folk track "Civilian Ways" is on Rancid's new release, "Let the Dominoes Fall," which came out Tuesday, and it's a quiet centerpiece to an album about returns -- of a soldier from war, of a country from eight years of the Bush presidency and from Rancid's own six-year hiatus.
During that time the band members tried out solo projects, doing albums that included rap crew side projects and mainstream pop collaborations. But after more than a half-decade apart musically, the East Bay quartet is ready to reclaim its singular sound.
As Green Day, the group's onetime peers in Berkeley's Gilman Street punk scene in the '80s and '90s, issues its second arena-sized rock opera, "21st Century Breakdown," Rancid's "Dominoes" offers a prickly blend of humid dub reggae and late-'70s punk that doesn't stray too far from early '90s hits like "Time Bomb" and "Ruby Soho," songs that vaulted the band into the pop consciousness.
"All the records have their own particular smell about them, and they smell the same way today as they did in '95," said guitarist and singer Lars Frederiksen. "We've been a band for a long while and it's hard to ignore that. But this is the beginning of the next 17 years."
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New landscape
Punk has changed dramatically around Rancid in the last decade, grafting elements of pure pop, prog-rock, metal and electronica onto its three-chord skeleton. Yet "Dominoes" feels more like a timely homecoming than a genre exercise. The first single, "Last One to Die," is Rancid's equivalent of a rap veteran's boast track, with barroom harmonies reminding doubters that "We sit on top of the world / And we're proving it every night."
