NOFX
Wolves In Wolves' Clothing

THE REVIEW

And so it was that in the now distant 1985, these blessed NOFX recorded this charming self-titled EP in Hollywood on Mystic Records, featuring a skull with bony hands on its head and a syringe-style pear between its teeth; only 100 copies of this artifact were printed, and according to Mike and company, it took six months to sell them all.

An inception so dismal certainly couldn't have predicted what fate had in store: after just a few years and a few albums, the four lads from San Francisco had already become one of the leading groups on Epitaph, and whether by chance or not, their right moment (1994) and the right album ("Punk in Drublic") arrived to breakthrough on a global scale after an almost decade-long grind, and barged into history, forming part of that nucleus of damn phenomena that even if you hate them too much, there's nothing you can do, you have to accept it, because at concerts with at least 200 people, at least 10 are wearing their shirts, 50% of your schoolmates have their patch on their backpacks, and there's always one of their songs on the infamous handmade mixed CDs.

Many are the detractors of this group, and I understand them, because it's not true that NOFX are 100% credible and indeed like all punk rock bands, they are profoundly contradictory, starting with their obese mind, the frontman Michele Grasso, who acts all punk but has dollars stashed away with his beautiful 3 (!!!) record labels, declaring that NOFX would never leave Epitaph to record on their own with Fat, but then they did, and more and more; then there are those who hate their sound, calling it childish, commercial, or saying it's always too similar to itself, despite a thousand bands around the world copying it continuously and even making money out of it.

In short, our four merry men with weight issues are either loved or hated. I love them, to madness, and if you ask my opinion, until the monumental, colossal, awesome masterpiece "The Decline" (1999), they have never missed a beat, producing albums, each different from the next, increasingly emotive, intense, each with its typical ORIGINAL sound, a term not exactly in vogue in the foul-smelling world of punk rock.
Sometimes they would whip up albums in 15 days with spontaneous tracks "as they come" and create masterful artworks ("Punk in Drublic"), sometimes they would compose with care, taking their time, and produce equally masterful artworks ("The Decline", "So Long and Thanks for All the Shoes"). But it is known that bands age and soon enough everyone reaches the point where they should stop playing because continuing only means recreating a worse self-parody.

In my opinion, from "Pump Up the Valuum" (2000) onwards, NOFX has consistently declined, releasing two more original albums that a fan aware of what this group once was cannot really appreciate. "The War on Errorism" and especially this last one are two nice, well-produced albums, with charming pieces, but from NOFX, I expect much more, I expect a revolution with every album. However, our friends no longer have the imagination and produce these uniform pieces, all with a sound that is a failed caricature of "So Long...", lacking sharpness, which any NOFX-clone band could write.
For this last one, they didn't even bother to write new songs, and indeed 6 out of the 18 tracks come straight from the monthly Fat Club 7"s, which were already a scam by themselves, therefore scam upon scam. The tracks flow one after the other and are nice but nothing more: there's "60%" which serves as both intro and outro and resembles the old "Theme from a NOFX Album", there are all these HCM little pieces that aren't anything special, even the title track that bets on a speed burst and double pedal just doesn't convince, it feels familiar; "Instant Crassic" is ugly and useless, "One Celled Creature" is a mushy, dark slow one that must have accidentally fallen into the CD.

In "The Man I Killed" they mimic the so-called "folk-punk" with the overused country loop that then speeds up; "USA-Holes" seems to be from the previous album, with the anti-Bush lyrics and riff similar to those circulating on that record; "Doornails" is the track dedicated to recently deceased members of the California scene, and the idea is wholly justified, but such a noble cause required a much better means than this banal acoustic pop ballad; in "Cantando en Español" with El Hefe on vocals, perhaps they aim to replicate the non-reproducible spontaneity of "My Heart is Yearning", failing, so you check out "The Marxist Brothers" and it feels like "Medio-core"; the lyrics maintain a good level without ever reaching that of the old lyrics: maybe the finest one is about alcoholism in "Seeing Double at the Triple Rock", likely the best track of the CD along with some others from the scam EPs, like "Cool and Unusual Punishment" (a little pop song about Japanese BDSM clubs) or "Benny Got Blowed Up" (a quick and clueless piece about a guy blowing himself up).

One last word about the artwork and the new logo, absolutely horrid and squalid, in the CD booklet there are only the lyrics in black on yellow, no writing from Fat Mike, no photos, it's all a disgrace compared to the old stuff. In short, in my opinion, with all the esteem and respect due and with all the affection I have for them, NOFX has not much left to say, and they would do better to disband, even to avoid embarrassing the older fans accustomed to far better stories. Stop.