Singles
Nofx
Fat Wreck Records
So after 14 albums how do you reinvent yourself to keep yourself as relevant as ever. If you are a succesful pop punk band that has led the way for most of your career in a way that gave no flying care to what went on around them in the past. If you were once trailblazing while ignorant of anything being destroyed in your wake why would you care what people say about your music. I’m sure they don’t really but this album dissolved from a double to a single due to Covid times. another victim of the pandemic or just something too difficult to produce. It all kicks off as a rock opera NOFX style with ‘The Big Drag’. Fat Mike is in reflective mode here with a darkness not readily identifiable within the band to date. Reflection keeps reoccurring and none more so than ‘I Love you more than I hate me’. Death and our inability to avoid it is written about in ‘My Bro Cancervive Cancer’
While ‘Fuck Euphemism’ sounds more a retrun to form with that fast tuneful style as Fat Mike Mike sings “My gender isn’t fluid but that’s how I like my beer”
I’ve always felt that despite all their drugs and obvious hedonsim NOFX somehow managed to make records that were relevant and Fat Mikes lyrics were a spotlight to his thoughts at the time. This time it is looking into that lifestyle whether it’s about the band buying “another gram in Birmingham” or doing lines in bizarre circumstances. But it never comes across as preachy or in any way the band telling you what to do with your life. That would not be their style. My style is to live in a different world than the band but we both come from that same pace. The punk rock community that means so much to both of us.
The great Steve Soto gets a song about him, which is the band nodding their hats to US harcore legends The Adolescents.
NOFX, as a band, have never taken themselves too seriously and that continues as they cover one of their own songs with updated lyrics. “Linoleum never meant anyhting to me, I never wrote a chorus, just verses and a bridge.”
Safe to say that after 14 records NOFX don’t need any new fans or friends. This may not gather any but if it was your introduction to the band it would be a good starting point which is one of the best compliments you could play to band that just keeps on giving.
Buy it from distrotable here
niallhope
