We all knew that Fat Mike wasn’t going to spend his time off after his run as NOFX’s frontman doing sudoku and baking banana bread. Before the band even ended their farewell tour, Fat Mike had already teamed up with hip hip artist Ceschi Ramos and Get Dead’s vocalist Sam King to form Codefendants, pioneers of new sub-genre ‘crimewave’ and creators of “the best aural sex of your life” (according to Mike). Punk has always been a neighbour to Hip-Hop and Codefendants have metaphorically hopped the fence to create an emotionally honest record overflowing with defiance and rage. It’s a world away from Mike’s previous output, but what could be really be more punk than burning your legacy down and building something subversive from the ashes?
‘Suicide By Pigs’ is one of the most raw, nihilistic songs to emerge in a long time, like carving a heart into your arm rather than wearing it on your sleeve. As a single, it’s the post-it note that reminds us that Fat Mike is capable of deep emotional intensity in the midst of the rest of his flippant lyrical commentary. It’s tragic and beautiful and still somehow hopeful that friendships will be what survives after a struggle, summoning the urge to text all the punk kids you hung out with when you were a punk kid and remind them of the nights when you’d talk about “turning pipe dreams into pipe bombs.” That outsider spirit continues in second single ‘Abscessed’ by trapping you in a tight, pent-up clicking guitar before a release into a flying pop punk chorus. Dropping in two very contrasting vocalists isn’t a new tactic, but it’s always a good one; give us high melodic freedom mixed with a tense, assertive hip-hop vocal and you’re onto musical gold.
Codefendants promised us a “completely genre-fluid album – a cross between hip hop, new-wave, flamenco, and the Beatles,” but don’t assume that means each song is a mashup of Hey Jude and 99 Problems. ‘Fast Ones’ is dark and dominated by a blurry repeating sample, the kind of song designed to played on car stereos at a tinnitus-inducing volume at 2am, and ‘Sell Me Youth’ is sarcastic eighties electronica put through a grinder and re-rolled into something far more politically conscious. But there’s one thread which unites this diverse set of songs: a desire to pull the listener into the questions that each song raises. “Heroes are human, and humans can be trash / That includes you listening, you’re not immune” sings Sam on ‘Brutiful’, and from the outset ‘Disaster Scenes’ asks us to define the difference between trauma dumping and laying your soul bare as an artist. We are as much a part of the album as the band are, and that’s both an unsettling and intimate experience.
In some ways ‘This is Crime Wave’ summarises itself on ‘Brutiful’: “It’s brutal and beautiful, to some it’s art; to some it’s sh*t.” This album is going to be a shock for the fans expecting NOFX but with a rapper involved, and it’s not necessarily going to be a project which changes the musical landscape. It may even get a few listeners to turn away from Fat Wreck. However, it is indeed both brutal and beautiful, taking the confessional moments from Fat Mike’s earlier work and combining them with a sense of the world these punks inhabit without resorting to cliches about ‘growing up on the streets’. Other artists with a yearning to make themselves seem gritty, take note; the bar has now been set for genre-hopping punk rock introspection.
KATE ALLVEY