Bad Religion are punk lifers. Over a decade and a half they've released two EPs and nine albums, all but Atlantics's 1994 Stranger Than Fiction and new The Gray Race on their DIY label Epitaph, eventual home of the Offspring, Pennywise, NOFX, ex-MC5 Wayne Kramer, and early L7. By the standards of punk purism, this is a varies roster, a lot more varied than Vad Religion. With one exception, all of their records have sounded, if not exactly alike, then remarkably similar - simultaneously distinctive and generic. The slashing chords are standard hardcore, the hard tempos slightly less frenetic than the mosh-pit ideal. Vocal harmonies and guitar hooks, the pop adulterations common to all punk bands with a life, are diligently subsumed in the rush. Although the melodies are never instant and only rarely catchy, they strike the ear as classic rather then hackneyed, because they're set apart by the contour and timbre of Greg Graffin's vocal attack. Rising and falling like a muezzin's wail, Graffin's hoarse, clear exhortations are the band's undeviating musical signature. On Epitaph's All Ages best-of, 1981's "We're Only Gonna Die," cut when Graffin was 16, sounds like a coda to 1990's "Modern Man" that for some reason was recorded on a beat-up four-track.

Whether you find this consistency inspirational or tedious - or merely, as I do, aesthetically engaging - it shouldn't mislead you into dismissing these lifers as hacks or journeymen. They're way too smart. One of the very few rock musicians ever to pursue a Ph.D. Graffin is a student of evolutionary biology, which lends his jeremiads about the end of the world in authority unaooeoached in the subgenre that formalized the apocalyptic tantrum. Guitarist Brett Gurewitz, was was reading Spinoza when he cofounded the band at 15, has lately exercised his brainpower making the Offspring's Smash one of the very few indie-rock albums ever to go beyond gold. That the best he's done