ALBUM REVIEW: NOFX – Single Album (Fat Wreck Chords)
Fourteen studio albums into their career, Californian punks NOFX aren’t about to undergo any sort of epiphany and change the way they sound or what they do, right? Well, wrong, actually
Their first album in nearly five years sees them slow down, tone down the messing about, get all serious, and sound all the better for it. They’re living proof that maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks.
The catalyst for this hasn’t been the year-long pandemic and lockdown, rather the realisation by bass-playing frontman Fat Mike that we only get one journey on this lump of rock, so you might as well make it last as long as possible, and enjoy it while you can.
Mike, who owns and runs the Fat Wreck Chords label, is one of three mainstays of NOFX, who formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1983, and have come to epitomise the SoCal skatepunk sound. The others are guitarist Eric Melvin and drummer Erik ‘Smelly’ Sandin. The long-time line-up is completed by guitarist/trumpeter El Hefe, who marks 30 years in the band this year.
They have sold more than eight million records, making them one of the most successful independent bands of all time, so they must have been doing something right. They’re known for their sarcastic sense of humour, but is it too much of a leap to say they’ve grown up at last?
Some of the songs here certainly suggest so. Single Album started life as a double album, but was pared down to 10 tracks, and they’re all-killer, no-filler, even if some of them are far removed from NOFX’s usual hook-laden punk rock template. Many of the songs are extremely personal, and listening to them is almost like listening in to a rehab session.
Opener The Big Drag, for starters, is more post-hardcore than pacy SoCal punk. At nearly six minutes long, it sees Mike in self-examination mode, and determined to make the most of life, even when it sucks.
Birmingham sees the unpredictable frontman coming to terms with the realisation he was a drug addict, and that it was time to get clean. He entered rehab in the fall of 2020 and has been sober since. The fact the band haven’t been able to hit the road probably helps.
Drugs are again the subject of Doors And Fours, a grim look into the early ’80s LA punk scene, when dozens of people – including lots of friends – overdosed on cocktails of prescription drugs. It’s a slow-paced song, sounds like Bad Religion, and Mike is clearly thankful just to have made it out the other side.
His self-destructive nature again is again brought into sharp focus on Fuck Euphemism, where he lays bare his sexual proclivities, and other people’s perceptions of them, while I Love You More Than I Hate Me and the closing piano ballad Your Last Resort turn a self-critical eye on the frontman’s relationships.
Mike deservedly received a lot of bad press and harmed the band’s hard-earned reputation with some ill-judged remarks about the 2017 mass shootings at a country music festival in Nevada, but he goes some way towards redressing the balance with one of the album’s standout songs, the reggae-inflected Fish In A Gun Barrel.
Apparently written months before that lone gunman attack which cost 60 people their lives, it questions why such events are always laid at the door of race or religion, when the real blame lies with a country which allows its citizens to take up arms so freely. It asks “Does anyone know how loaded he was when he unloaded his gun?” and concludes: “The blame is always placed on someone/It’s always how the story is spun/Only a lunatic would sell a lunatic a gun.”
Elsewhere, Grieve Soto is a heartfelt tribute to Steve Soto, frontman of Californian hardcore band the Adolescents, who sadly passed away in 2018, with Mike singing: “I’m so grateful that before your end/I told you how you’re my hero and my treasured friend”. But the song takes an unexpected twist when Melvin takes the mic to warn Mike to be “cautious, more respectful, less obnoxious”.
Then there’s Linewleum, a deconstruction of probably the band’s best-known song (and certainly most-covered) song, from their 1994 breakthrough album Punk In Drublic. Mike sings: “It’s time to put Linoleum out to stud and make sure that it gets laid.” Would they dare drop it from their live set? The pandemic means that hasn’t been put to the test yet, but would you put it past them?
NOFX have always done things their own way, and show they’re far more than one-trick ponies when they come up with a record this different, this personal, so far into their career. This is right up there with their best work, precisely because it’s not the same old NOFX. It’s available from Fat Wreck in vinyl, CD and digital formats HERE. 8/10.
