Album Review: NOFX - “Single Album”

 

I'll put my hands up and say that NOFX are one of those bands who seem to have drifted in and out of my musical listening over the past two decades. I first listened to them back in the early noughties when I was given the excellent War On Errorism album (the record Green Day's over-rated American Idiot should have been) to review for a 'zine I was working for at the time but I lost track of them a bit afterwards only to for them to kind of claw their way back into my consciousness over the last couple of years via an excellent split album with Frank Turner (West Coast vs Wessex) and Fat Mike's Cokie The Clown side project (You're Welcome must be one of the most bleak and harrowing albums I've ever listened to but it's pretty damn amazing it has to be said).

We're thrown into Single Album one at the deep end with opening track The Big Drag being nearly six minutes long and dealing with drug related deaths and an existential crisis (very similar to a heavier version of a Cokie track). Angry, sinister and furious, it's everything the likes of the Offspring will never be. The political anger of I Love You More Than I Hate Me and the tale of a gender pronoun issue leading to a bar fight Fuck Euphemism see the band sailing back into more familiar waters but the bleak ska-influenced anti-gun lobby tirade Fish In A Gun Barrel and the fast-paced drug addiction lament Birmingham take us back into more sinister waters.

Linewleum is a bit more light-hearted with the band railing against bad covers of their biggest hit but My Bro Cancervive Cancer, as its title suggests, takes things back into much darker territory as does the ode to a departed friend Grieving Soto. Doors And Fours is a real curveball musically with the band cranking up the heaviness with almost Metallica-esque riff as Fat Mike delivers a vicious anti-heroin ode before Your Last Resort with its ode to defiance and dysfunctional relationships which starts out as a stark piano ballad before well and truly stepping the tempo up to full on fury guides things home.

Single Album is a much more serious album than long term NOFX fans will be used to and it definitely has a similarity with the Cokie the Clown album lyrically if not musically. It's to Fat Mike and co's credit that forty years into their career, they're still putting out albums that have the ability to surprise you both musically and lyrically. Single Album is definitely well worth a look.

Bandcamp link here

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

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