Political turmoil and music have always gone hand in hand. Even in periods of mass apathy, there’s still protest music to be found. In this article I’ll be revisiting an album by US punk rockers Bad Religion, and its part in my political awakening.

The ‘End of History’ early-2000’s was not a great time to be a young person getting interested in politics. I’d listen to my dad’s old Billy Bragg tapes, naively longing for a time when there was something to fight against. In The New Internationalist, I’d read about the human and environmental toll of unfettered globalisation. The problem was, here in the UK, consumer capitalism seemed to be working OK for most people (we’d find out later that it wasn’t, but 2008 was still a long way off). I was, no doubt insufferably, a rebel without a cause.

Then George W Bush and Tony Blair decided to invade Iraq, and Britain saw its biggest mass protest in a generation. Plenty of people my age opposed the war, but frustratingly, I knew few of them. Most of my friends were casually pro-war. Or, they’d internalised the received wisdom of the ‘60s generation: “there’s no point protesting, it doesn’t achieve anything.” Or, worst of all: “It doesn’t affect me, so I don’t care.” They cared about Pop Idol, football or Big Brother, not this.

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In the age of Spotify, the compilation CD might be as redundant as dial-up internet. But for me, they were an essential component of my teenage soundtrack. In this article, I’ll be revisiting an experience shared by so many music fans of my generation: listening to a collection of songs curated by someone else.

Always displayed prominently in HMV, there were lots of compilation albums. If you followed the charts, there were those interminable ‘Now’ albums. But if indie was more your thing, there were compilations like ‘Shine’, ‘The Bands’ or this one – ‘Reloaded’. Why did we buy them? For me, they were a way of discovering new bands without having to splash out on whole albums or buying endless singles.

On getting this CD out, my first thought was: look at some of this stuff! My second thought was: look at some of this stuff. There isn’t space to talk about every single track, but let’s jump in and take a look at the highs and lows of ‘Reloaded’.

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This week I’m revisiting an album that was either a triumphant return to form or the sound of a band who’d stopped trying depending which review you read. But contemporary critics almost always got Oasis albums wrong. So let’s look afresh at their 2002 album, Heathen Chemistry.

Oasis are one of my all-time favourites, and this came out at the peak of my Oasis fandom. But unlike some of their other releases this one has languished more-or-less unplayed in my CD collection for years. I loved it in 2002, but how will it sound now?

First impressions are pretty good. The Hindu Times has all the basic constituents of a good Oasis song: swagger, soft drug references and a chorus involving “rock ‘n’ roll”. It’s like a matured version of Rock & Roll Star, the opener on their still-blistering 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe. But it’s also got some of the downsides of the archetypal Oasis song; for example the tedious weather references (“you’re my sunshine, you’re my rain.”). What any of this has to do with Hinduism is anyone’s guess. Overall it’s a paint-by-the-numbers Oasis song – which is something you can say of the whole album.

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Remember Feeder? ‘He’s got a brand new car… it’s got leather seats, it’s got a CD player, player, player, player’. How about now? This week I’m revisiting their massive breakthrough album, Echo Park.

Feeder was music almost everyone could agree on. Indie enough for people like me, heavy enough for the nu-metal kids, catchy enough for those who just listened to chart pop. They were unlikely to get turned off in the sixth-form common room or at a party. No doubt there will have been an iconoclast or two who hated them, but generally speaking, the consensus was that Feeder were ‘alright’.

But they weren’t anyone’s favourite band, either. Whilst writing this, I asked my sister if she remembered them. With only two years between us, we used to share a lot of music back then. She replied that she bought their albums and went to their concerts without even really liking them that much.

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It was the multi-platinum selling album that dragged British indie-rock out of the doldrums. But at the time, Is This It more or less passed me by. In this article, I’ll be revisiting this seminal debut album, and asking: in hindsight, is it all it’s cracked up to be?

The Strokes were the ultimate in don’t-give-a-fuck, New York cool. Back in high school, this gave the band associations I didn’t care for. I associated them with a certain type of apathetic trendie; the kids who’d been into Ibiza dance music just a year or two earlier and suddenly morphed into bed-haired indie fans. The least cool trait in their book was to be seen to care about anything. Whilst I was being politicised by the Iraq War, these guys directed their snark towards anti-war protesters and Bush supporters alike.

I suppose what they were afraid of was being into anything that the piss might feasibly be taken out of. This album, right down to its mildly sexually suggestive cover art, was a safe bet. They all owned it. Just like they all owned By The Way by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Consequently, I thought the album wasn’t for me.

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