Growing up means letting go and moving on.
I get that, and for the most part I can accept the fact that sometimes the things you once loved becomes, well, lame or uncool. Fire engines and tonka trucks rocked when I was a little kid, but needless to say I cant find much use for them at the ripe old age of 25. But it's cool. I've found a way to sleep at night without them.
But music, at least for me, has always been a little bit harder to let go of. For some reason it's difficult me to leave behind certain bands, even if conventional wisdom says i should. Here I am, a college graduate with a good job etc. etc. and I still have a fond preference for loud, fast and perpetually adolescent music I should have left to collect dust a long time ago. Sure I'm big into Wilco, Talking Heads and hosts of other bands I would have scoffed at mercilessly when I was in high school, but I'd be lying if i said I didn't still get a charge out the Descendents, Bad Religion, No Use For a Name and the bratty skate punk I grew up with as a kid.
But what about the bands you can't shake loose even if the torch you once carried for them continues to grow dimmer with each passing record? Do you stomach the bad out of reverence for all the good times you had listening a band when you were younger, or do you just cut bait? Does a band's former greatness make up for its latter day sins?
Maybe the appropriate response to this admittedly heady line of questioning is "Who cares," and I can't say I thought much about any of this at all until maybe two weeks ago. It was then that I picked up "Coaster," the new and regrettably meh record by NOFX. The record's flagrant mediocrity didn't exactly surprise me, especialy following an album that was far and away the worst of their long career. And yet I still bought, knowing that it would at least halfway suck, because I almost felt an obligation to follow through with one of my all time favorite bands.
A little backstory: In the mid 90s, a halcyon time when punk rock slowly began taken over every fiber of my being, there was NOFX, who alongside bands like Rancid, Green Day, Pennywise and Bad Religion were putting out the best punk music of my generation. In fact, everything NOFX did from 1990-2002 or so was borderline untouchable, from underground classics like "Punk In Drublic" and "White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean" to the ironically titled "I Heard They suck Live." Hell, even "Heavy Petting Zoo," which with its slower tempos and overall grungier sound felt like a deliberate stab at alienating its own fan base, was still pretty good. For a while it really felt like the band could do no wrong.
And that was exactly what I was thinking when I bought "Coaster." It didn't matter that "Wolves In Wolves Clothing" was terrible, or that "War on Errorism," felt too preachy and lacked the punch of the band's earlier output. Everytime I hold a new NOFX record, I have fleeting hope that it will recapture the bite and smartass swagger of those 90s records.
To be fair, "Coaster" has flashes of the irreverant skate punk style the band rests its cult hero status on, but in the end that's all they were. Flashes. At 10 tracks and just over a half an hour, the album felt less like a record and more like an afterthought. If I didn't know any better, i would have even gone as far to say lazy.
Would have that is, until i read this exerpt from an interview frontman Fat Mike did with Bay Area Decider a few weeks back:
"We're lazier," he said. "We're not as hungry now. We kind of take it easy. Around 1994, we reached a high point in our music."
Had this been said 10 years ago, it probably would have been funny, but instead it now feels strangely true. The band's famously sloppy, couldn't give a fuck attitude has long been it's trademark, but rarely has that attitude translated so clearly on record. "Coaster" does sound like they pushed it through and tried to beat the clock. Part of me gets it. These guys have been around longer than I've been alive (literally), so maybe they are fatiguing. And if they want to take it easy maybe that's their right, even if it occasionally comes at expense to fans like me. It would be hard to argue they don't deserve it.
But I'll go down with the ship. The next time they want to mail it in with a less than stellar batch of tunes, I'll be right there ready to buy, hoping against hope that it's the second coming of "So Long And Thanks For All the Shoes." It's like a drug you just can't kick, but like Fatty says, "Drugs Are Good."
