NOFX – Single Album

No matter how much or how fast life changes, some things seem to stay the same.  Take SoCal punk rock legends NOFX for instance – the band has existed for over thirty-five years as a pillar of the punk rock community, maintaining their unapologetic opinions and loud and proud lifestyle.  But staying true to your core doesn’t always mean stagnating or being adverse to evolving.  

Over the years, front man and label tycoon Fat Mike has brought an increasing self-awareness to the band, venturing out during various solo outings (Cokie the Clown) and vanity projects (Home Street Home), and bringing some of that passion back to his home base.  For the band’s latest full length, Single Album, Fat Mike leans heavily on the self-depreciating lens of his solo work, but applies it to the lived truths and societal observations laid out in a typical NOFX album.  

The album opens with “The Big Drag,” a slow, swelling number that paints a bleak picture of mankind’s prospects for survival. “The human race is not worth watching or wagering on, we’re just a longshot, an underdog,” groans Fat Mike, nearly taking the track’s first three minutes to arrive at the sort of melody and rhythm typically associated with the punk rock powerhouse.  The band sparingly deploys percussion until mid-track when the tempo fully takes off in grand fashion.  Once in gear, the song proceeds at a heavy-leaning mid-tempo pace, albeit far from the typical skate-punk speed that NOFX is known for.  This meaty introduction makes for a forceful ideological framework that frames Single Album with a unapologetic purpose.

From here on out, the songs that hit hardest have the quickest wit and sharpest tongue.  “I Love You More Than I Love Me” patters along with a steady skate-punk ready rhythm that would sound right at home wedged between No Use For A Name and Lagwagon on any classic Fat Wreck Chords compilation.  The song’s melancholy exploration of being “intimate without intimacy” in a relationship pre-destined to fail hammers home the sense of isolation one can feel sleeping in the same bed as someone who has become a stranger.  Fat Mike describes the experience of being “a friendless best friend, a single bookend, a return to sender” in a barrage of similes and metaphors that exemplify the depth of songwriting that has evolved over NOFX’s career.  Fat Mike’s signature hybridization of words, like “gutter punk-tuation” and “sundial-tone,” keeps listeners engaged and guessing where the next literary device will lead.  

NOFX also tackles identity issues, describing Fat Mike’s “first gender pronoun bar fight,” which is as entertaining as it is informative, and the hypocrisy between American firearm laws, religious motives, and various other systemic forces as they relate to mass shootings in “Fish In A Gun Barrel.”  The latter breaks up the track listing as the band’s tsole ska-punk offering. Meanwhile, “Linewleum” further digs into the band’s history as a reflective deconstruction of one of the band’s breakaway underground “hits” (“Linoleum”) that has spawned innumerable covers from every corner of the globe.  Fat Mike wrote the track as a celebration of a song he has no emotional attachment to, bluntly stating that “Linoleum never meant anything to me, I never wrote a chorus, just verses and a bridge,” but acknowledges how much it means to others while rambling through various other fun facts (like how it was the last song that Tony Sly ever played).  The final track, “Your Last Resort,” ends with a breakneck tempo and curiously fragile piano notes, reinforcing the additional layers and emotional complexities that NOFX has embraced since their earliest years.

Fat Mike writes each album as if it’s his last, acknowledging that the punk rock lifestyle can be unforgiving.  If Fat Mike keeled over and croaked today, Single Album once again ensures that he would have said all he needed to – up to this point.  This recognition of mortality likely stems from the early passing of No Use For A Name’s Tony Sly, and is reinforced more recently by the passing of Adolescents’ bassist Steve Soto in “Grieve Soto.”  With each member of NOFX hovering around the fifty-four/fifty-five year old mark, the future is uncertain, but the present is clearly defined.  With roughly five years between recent releases, the band members could very well be pushing sixty for their next release.  In this way, Single Album is the album that NOFX needed to write at this moment, and it succeeds at capturing what fans have always loved while existing firmly in the present.