The art tries to go for a distinct colour scheme, but it's kinda bland. My real issue is that the J-card is folded along perforated lines, so I wouldn't count on it holding up with repeated folding/unfolding to look at the stuff on the inside.
The first couple of tracks are a promising start, but they're kinda corny as punk goes. The arrangement and the lyrical content sounds more emo than punk, to be honest. Evil's my Friend has the Ska elements that are kinda the reason you come to this album. The instrumentation is interesting enough to distract you from the fact that you're hearing the same lyrics over and over again.
Things start to fall apart with the title track, Honor Is All We Know. The instrumentation starts to lose steam here, and you really start to notice the repetitiveness. A Power Inside is extremely repetitive and is the worst track on the A side. Already Dead tries too hard to be edgy in all the wrong ways, to the point that it's kind of a hard listen.
The rest of the A side is decent enough, but nothing really floored me.
Diabolical is an absolute slog. Completely muscially uninteresting and lyrically cringe-inducing. I said out loud to myself, "my god, this song is way too long." Gravedigger is even worse. That one's the worst on the album.
Malfunction is the clear highlight of the B side and probably of the whole tape. You hear those Ska keys in there. And they actually wrote enough song for this song! Good stuff.
The rest of the B side is more or less okay without much to note. Not as good as the A side, but still very listenable.
It seems like Rancid wrote about 60% as much lyrical content as they needed to fill the runtime of this album. A handful of tracks have enough to go around, but the rest are in various states of malnutrition. It's a shame, since the rest of the ingredients here are solid enough to make for a good (if not exceptional) album.
I don't think this Ska/punk marriage is a happy one. Sure, they both emerged from the British working class at very roughly the same time, but they just don't gel musically. The album flips back and forth between styles as if it needed more time in the blender to get a more consistent and interesting fusion going.
I'd say it isn't. There are way too many misses that you have to skip over to get to the good stuff. As a result, it doesn't lend itself well to being listened to on a tape or record if you don't want to be driven nuts by the repetition. Skip the physical copy of this one.
I think so. Fast-forward every time you start getting bored and you'll have a decent enough time.
I paid 15 bones for a sealed copy of this album, and I'd call it a "maybe buy" at five.