NOFX : Coaster

Not even the death of CDs can stop NOFX, with 'Coaster'. ...
6.9 Fat Wreck
2009 

NOFX : CoasterLos Angeles’ NOFX celebrated their twenty-fifth (!) year of speedy pop-punk with a massive worldwide tour last year, including playing Israel & Africa, all compiled in the FUSE documentary/DVD NOFX: All-Access Backstage Pass.  But the band hasn’t slowed down, putting out Coaster, a post-Bush, post-record industry record that still hews to the style they’ve been doing for a quarter century or so now.

Their third album on singer/bassist Fat Mike’s Fat Wreck label, Coaster employs Mike’s humor on the title track, a riff on the death of CDs with a fun attitude.  NOFX jumped into the anti-Bush punk movement of this decade with their first Fat Wreck release, 2003’s The War On Errorism, and Coaster still has lots of religious/political-themed lyrics that are not inspired, but not overdone, for the most part.  There are also some teen angst tracks, despite the band being old enough to have finished graduate school by now, and those lyrics are likewise not amazing, but not emo-whiney.  Instead, NOFX is still best with funny songs like “Coaster”, “First Call”, “I Am an Alcoholic” (a topic the band can address properly…) and especially “Creeping Out Sara” – where Mike admits to freaking out Sara (or it might have been Tegan) of twin sister, Canadian, lesbian alt-pop duo Tegan & Sara, admitting to his inebriated lesbo- & Canada-phobia/fascination.

While the band’s lyrics on Coaster are something of an improvement (maybe helped by the fact that the record isn’t near-twenty tracks in length, like many previous albums), NOFX still employs the relatively good-natured speedy pop-punk that they first started with, oh so many years ago (though there are stabs at lounge-y on “Alcoholic”, and classic rock with “Eddie, Bruce and Paul”, but still done in fun way).  The death of the record industry couldn’t stop NOFX, anymore than the Bush years or post-Green Day pop-punk hype of the mid-nineties.  So raise a glass to NOFX – just don’t leave any rings…

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