This came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
After nearly 10 albums, you’d expect a band to have settled on a sound and a style. But not 311.
This Nebraska quintet’s fifth major-label studio outing (after three indie CDs, a live disc and a compilation) finds them unable to decide which of today’s trendy sounds to embrace: One song is ska-punk, another is rap-metal, the next is reggae-funk, a fourth is Latin-rock. It’s not that any of them are awful — in fact, on a track-by-track basis, I’d take Soundsystem over Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other any day. But taken a whole, Soundsystem is less than the sum of its parts. By the time it’s over, you don’t feel like you’ve heard an album — more like you’ve spent an hour randomly skipping through the contents of a frat boy’s CD changer.
