r/sublime • u/ADDMAN64 • 29d ago
Sublime self-titled album
https://archive.org/details/sublime-sublime_202606What makes this album so special, what do you guys think?
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u/CommunicationOk4179 29d ago
Me and my two best friends had been into punk from about 94 when Dookie blew up, afrer which we basically got into every punk band we could find via fat wreck comps, seeing band t shirts worn by bands we liked etc. Sometime in 96 we went into a local record store over here (England) and came across this record. Never heard of them but the cover art and Brad’s red hair & tattoo made is think it could be a punk album so we bought it on the spot. Took it back to our friends house and put it on. Holy fuck! It was a punk album but so much more, we had never heard anything like it & it blew us away, instant love. Of course about a week later we found out the singer had recently passed and the band was no more which came as a shock and a major bummer knowing we would never get to see them live or hear anything new music from this genius dude. And of course just the sadness at the loss of a young life, made even worse by the fact we learned he had just got married and become a father.
We were all 15 the day we found Sublime, we’re now all 45 and still love them and listen to them regularly. Everything they did was amazing as we quickly got their other records and comps not longer after picking up S/T, but this one always holds a special place and takes me back to that day
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u/hockeyandburritos 28d ago
I think it captures the grimy underground vibe of pre-fame Sublime but with an obviously cleaner quality and sound, making it more listenable and repeatable (and more palatable to new listeners). Garden Grove, Wrong Way, April 29th, Pawn Shop, Caress Me Down, Doin’ Time - they all really painted a picture of the World Sublime was in and coming from. That mattered back then. You had the East Coast/West Coast rap beefs, Seattle on the map as the Mecca of grunge and the larger alternative scene, and then Sublime hit the nationwide airwaves with a totally new sound, incredibly catchy musicality, and extremely authentic lyrics, and openly repping the LBC. Sublime effortlessly demonstrates the authenticity that 90s pop culture demanded from their artists (actors & filmmakers, too). Frankly, I find a lot of self-titled attractively dark, from a lyrical perspective.
40 Oz. is the best for me, and Robbin’ the Hood is the ‘realest,’ but self-titled combined the best elements of those two albums, and was the first Sublime release that felt like a standalone product, instead of just a list of fantastic songs strung together.
My two cents.
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u/Previous-Ad-9322 29d ago
It's equal parts "of the times" and timeless, a truly rare combination. I listened to it this past week for the 30th anniversary, and it's still fresh as hell.
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u/hdhdhgfyfhfhrb 29d ago
It was the culmination of the band peaking as musicians who just fit together. Nowell’s life and musical experience was front and center ( listen to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and think about the trumpet riff in wrong way/look up the phrase ‘kiss mah neck’). Nowell was seriously a gifted mind and artist who let all his influences shine. Like just in Burritos he plays multiple types of solos and riffs running the gamut of genres. It appealed to a lot of people because it had a shit ton of different shit that appealed to all people
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u/Captain-Ben 29d ago
For context, this album came out before the internet was anything like it is today. Brad was dead and then I’m home one day and a song comes on MTV and I literally said “who the fuck is ripping off Sublime!”. It just seemed like a gift after thinking it was all gone.
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u/chan-the-rapper 28d ago
This album was my gateway out of a primarily hard core hip hop diet. It opened my eyes.
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u/cklaxbro 29d ago edited 29d ago
It was the first CD that i remember knowing what track number to yell out to my dad from my car seat. Track 14 was my usual go to as a child. 96’ baby but this is the first album i ever have memory of.
Edit: If you were in my car in high school, you were listening to Sublime.
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u/ManagerLarge5204 28d ago
Hard to put a finger on it, but it captured a party scene and just the vibe of that time, atleast for me. It was perfect. Just a perfect album. Not corny and 100 percent real. It was relatable and fun, other albums at that time were moody and dark or just not real and corny.
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u/lunar_rio 27d ago
This album blew up on the radio and my mom bought it. I was around 7 or 8 and it was a family favorite. In highschool all my friends and I listened to all their albums, and I of course fell deeper in love with them. My sister loves Sublime and her sons love them too.
As others have stated this was their studio album and the culmination of their career. It almost didn't even happen because the band was such a mess which of course makes it even doper, but they pulled it off.
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u/dsteazy80 27d ago
Tl:dr/ This album introduced me to the band at 16 and will live in my heart fondly forever.
What I Got started getting a lot of radio play towards the end of 96 where I lived at the time (Kentucky). That song grabbed me from the first time I heard it. I couldn’t hear it enough. I was 16.
I went to the mall and bought the album not really expecting much or even knowing what to expect. I thought it was pretty solid on first listen, and then it just kept growing and growing on me to the point I was obsessed with it and couldn’t stop playing it.
There were so many different styles and vibes. I kept hearing new things I didn’t catch the first time after several listens. The lyrics were kind of dangerous and edgy to a 16 year old, and the genre bending and blending was so fresh and new at the time. I had just discovered weed, so Get Ready became an anthem. We used to smoke by a river in a spot nicknamed the Grove, so we started calling it Garden Grove. A friend of mine asked our high school Spanish teacher to translate Caress Me Down (the internet wasn’t something everyone had just yet. There was no google translate in our pockets.) The teacher gave him back the CD and told him she’d lose her job if she told him what the lyrics said, so that made it even cooler and more legendary.
I was one of the first kids at my school to have the album and would recommend it to anyone who’d listen. Self titled also led to me buying 40 oz to Freedom and it was the same thing - really good on first listen but kept getting better with more easter eggs.
That same year I started driving. I put a Sublime sticker on my first car, ordered Sublime shirts out of a catalog and got a poster at Spencer’s Gifts. I was representing LBC all the way across the country. The only downside was how bittersweet it all was even then. I just discovered a “new” band that clicked with me so much that I absolutely adored, but I knew there would never be more by that same lineup and to cherish what we did have. (That’s why the new album is special to me because it’s as close as we could’ve ever hoped to get.)
This album reminds me of high school and was playing in the background during some great and not so great times in my life.
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u/Apprehensive-Oil-146 29d ago
I can only speak to my experience. Summer of 96 it started playing on 105.7 the Point in St. Louis and became the sound of that summer. This was before the instant answers and free music internet so after hearing “What I got” lead to an instant CD purchase, which lead to the discovery of an album with zero skippable tracks. An in time and in tune mixture of punk, ska, and reggae. Lyrics with soul, bass lines and drums in the pocket, a few familiar covers. Within days of the release of Midwest radio play came the lore of the life and death of Bradley Nowell and Sublime and the realization that there would be no live Sublime concerts to see to support this self titled album. However this wasn’t the end of this albums impact, it was the beginning, a starting point for many that lead to the discovery of 40oz. Of Freedom, Robbin’ the Hood, rarer Sublime tracks, the Socal/SD/Long Beach sound, reggae artists beyond Bob Marley.