To realistically cope with the reissue of a 16-year-old album that was already soaked in pop nostalgia when it was released, you must be possessed of a critical faculty that permits you to get so hypermeta that eventually the nutshell becomes the squirrel. That’s not what Redd Kross was ever about. From roots as snotty skate punks up through this 1987 candy-pop masterpiece (we won’t talk about subsequent major-label disasters), the McDonald brothers deftly combined punk irony with a severe love for the most saccharine aspects of pop culture without worry about the dialectical implications. Neurotica was the band’s shining moment and, with tracks like “Frosted Flake” and “Ballad of a Love Doll,” was quite revolutionary in its muscled-up punk-rock take on ’60s/’70s AM pop. Laying the groundwork for hundreds of bands (Rivers Cuomo acts like he wants to be Eddie Van Halen, but it’s obvious he’d be nowhere without Steven McDonald’s influence), Neurotica ushered in a new era of self-referential happiness at the end of the Reagan era. It still bristles with the energy that made it so exciting then. Now, how about a DVD of Spirit of 76? (This reissue is remastered with two bonus tracks.)
This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2003.